Department of Yer Dreamin', Pal

[akirlu]

Craigslist subject line says: "Free Pet Rooster, To Approved Home Only." Yeah, I don't even have to click through. This is some softhearted idiot who decided to raise laying chickens and found they or their neighbors can't cope with the noise of a rooster around. And they're We Must Not Hurt The Cute An' Fluffy Animals vegetarians who can't bear the thought of slaughtering their own birds. Or anyone else doing it either. So now they're looking for someone stupid enough or wealthy enough to be willing to do what they themselves are not -- keep a noisy, unproductive bird fed and healthy for years to come out of a sheer love of animals. Not. Gonna. Happen. The Happy Retirement Home for Unwanted Roosters is the fricassee pot. And even if they actually manage to find a sucker this time, it only pushes the problem off a few years. Hens can live a good long while after they stop laying, certainly long enough that keeping them in feed makes the ultimate cost of the eggs they laid during their productive years prohibitively high.

People, if you are not willing to kill a chicken, don't keep chickens in the first place.

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Mmm...coq au vin

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd think there's at least the chance that they get turned into wethers and sold off to someone's rental brush-clearing herd. I don't know of any similar uses for chickens. Of course, baby goats are also cuter, so if you don't like gamy meat, there's extra incentive to find work for 'em.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, we happened to just such a rooster a few years ago, and got him a few hens for company. Great eggs, real eggs from happy hens. We liked his music, and the neighbors' rooster too.

Of course it may help that in our semi-rural area the neighbors are, as Hipshot Percussion said, scattered some.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's swell when it works out, and fresh eggs are amazing.

I didn't mean it was impossible, just not the way to bet. One sees ads for surplus roosters all the time around these parts, and most people who aspire to backyard chickens know they don't need a rooster to get the eggs. There's been a boomlet in urban animal husbandry, so many of the folks in question are not in rural neighborhoods, and if they went go the full buy-fertile-eggs route to get hens, they'll probably get several little surplus cockerels in the bargain and not want those, either. Perhaps I'm cynical, but given the seemingly rampant problem of dog flippers on CL, I just don't see that any given rooster has much chance of finding a pet home,

I don't have much sympathy for anyone who counts on other people to swoop in and solve the animal husbandry dilemma they didn't think of before they started. I'm at least as scornful of people who are trying to offload dogs and cats they've had for less than a year because they've suddenly discovered that they need to move cross country, or they've just(!) moved into a no pets apartment, or they've noticed that oops, they're in the military and the military periodically deploys people and doesn't allow them to take Wiggles along, or they're having another kid or they already had kids and didn't realize that a puppy is just as much work. All that shit is foreseeable and stuff they really, really should have taken into account before they took on the responsibility of a living creature. But those sad bastards are too numerous to take individual note of here.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Amen.