I have a rooster. I’m just saying.
Seems like lately, on those rare occasions when I can write on my own goddam blog, all I want to write about is the damned chickens. That’s because lately my relationship with the chickens mostly involves a hatchet, and that’s really kind of confusing. I mean, I’m not used to everybody being cool with my whacking the animals I’m supposed to care for with a hatchet. They regularly ask me to do this lately, which makes me wonder if I’ve been doing the whole animal-care thing wrong all this time. All that time-consuming nurturing, and it turns out people really wanted me to cut off heads with a hatchet. Weird.
Until very recently, at the Secret Lair there were only three chickens, the bald ladies, and they’re not really all that interesting. They eat, they lay eggs, they pluck out one anothers’ feathers. What else is there to say? But a couple of weeks ago Landlady brought them a rooster. He’s still growing, and still figuring out what it means to be the rooster in a little flock of bald hens.
He’s trying, but he hasn’t got the hang of sex. I can relate. So lately what he thinks it means is crowing all the damn time.
I live for the hours when the chickens are asleep. It’s basically the only quiet time I get. I remember when being a hermit was relaxing.
Hmm, and so… what is the purpose of having the rooster? The hens lay eggs just fine without one. Let him get a little larger, maybe, and then it can be hatchet time again. I had a rooster once that never seemed to sleep… and he didn’t live too long. 🙂
what is the purpose of having the rooster?
That’s a question I ponder daily, ML. In theory it’s an existential, circle-of-life thing. In theory, all you need to make little baby chickens is a momma chicken and a daddy chicken who love each other very much. In practice it’s more complex than that, because most hens have been bred to regard their eggs – fertilized or not – as just another waste byproduct. They wouldn’t know how to hatch eggs and care for chicks, and they wouldn’t care to learn.
And so in practice it’s a lot easier to just order day-old chicks in the mail, which makes roosters a redundant pain in the ass. But that’s not a survivalisty thing to say.
You should get a few more roosters, then kill all but the one that crows the least.
If you are thinking “survivalist” stuff re the chickens, you’re going to have to do several things differently anyway. A single rooster and a few hens won’t cut it for long, even if the hens would brood the eggs propperly. The gene pool is far, far too small. And if the chicken breed/type has had effective reproduction bred out of them, you won’t have much to work with even if you had hundreds of them.
What you need is a truly old fashioned breed that does brood their own chicks. Quite a few of them still around, actually.