Rooster Relocation

Our hens are going bald and looking tired, and the boys had been fighting amongst themselves for too long. We ended up sending Arthur away. I took an old cat litter bucket and cut a hole in it for Arthur's head to poke out. We closed it with a couple of C-clamps. As long as he was sitting still it was okay, but he didn't like traveling one little bit.


Here he is, sitting in the back of the truck. He has no idea what's in store for him, so he's happy and alert. Okay, so he's really just alert.


Once we got into the car, though, he wasn't so sure. He kept ducking his head into the bucket. At first I was afraid that he was sick, or perhaps too hot. He would poke his head out, and then his eyes would close and his head would slowly sink back into the bucket. He wasn't sick or hot - it was the same thing that happens when you put an infant in a car seat and drive around. He couldn't stay awake!

Arthur ended up going to a nice family who's starting their own chicken farm. They've built a HUGE coop - 10'x20'! Room enough for a hundred chickens, if they choose to keep that many. On the other hand, apparently Arthur is the first. Well, good luck to them.

But if we thought that one fewer roosters would solve our problems, would calm Cargill down and give the hens a rest, we were sadly mistaken. Our poor hens were still suffering from male-pattern balding (yes, balding of a kind typically only put there by a male chicken), and what's worse, when we tried to put the chicks in with the adult chickens, he started attacking the little chicks too, pecking holes into the backs of the necks of two of them so that they had to spend a couple of nights in the chicken infirmary.

Well, enough is too much. I planned out a single-chicken house for Cargill, who will now have the smaller chicken yard to himself.


The door doubles as the ramp down, and the inside has the same kind of droppings boards that the big henhouse has. We even put convenient handles on it so that we can pick it up and carry it around. The roof has fiberglass on it, and the "windows" are well-protected with heavy-gauge hardware cloth to let air circulate and keep predators out.


The top flips open for cleaning and...I don't know...peeking. We put Cargill into the box and he immediately hopped up onto the perch and proceeded to cuss us out in chicken, which is a lot like German in that it typically embodies complex sentiments in single, long words: "beings who are technologically superior while being morally inferior," "flightless heathens who lack the ability to appreciate and respect the nobility of fowl," and a whole lot of just plain "jerks."


We put locks on the outside so that at night he can be locked in. When we let him out of the box for the first time, he did what any POW is expected to do: attempted escape. He flew directly over the lower fence of the chicken yard. It took some doing, but we finally caught him again and I clipped one of his wings. We chased him around the chicken yard again to test his flight ability, which was now nil. Good. So, now he's walking around his much-diminished kingdom, trying to reclaim what's left of his dignity.

Good luck with that.

Chicken Seraglio

Having sent Arthur away to a family who are only just starting their flock, Cargill is now the sole patriarch of the yard, strutting and crowing and taking liberties with the hens in a way that suggests that his former restraint was due to the presence of his rival. We had hoped that reducing the rooster population by half would give the poor overburdened hens a rest, but the bald patches on their heads appear to be growing worse rather than better.

The Pirate and I talked seriously about giving Cargill away as well. The response to my advert in craigslist was far better than I'd hoped, and finding a good home for Cargill wouldn't be a problem. On the other hand, I had hopes of raising some tiny araucanas and had gotten more araucana hens specifically for the purpose.

The solution was simple: Cargill gets a bachelor pad. He's to be exiled to the smaller of the chicken yards, where he will be alone until it's time to start a batch of chicks. The hens and the tiny chicks will have the larger yard where they can frolic and scratch, carefree and unburdened by the unreasonable demands of Sultan Cargill. The avian odalisques will carry out their duties in what will become the women's and children's quarters of the chicken yard.

As for Cargill, we're building him his own little sultan's palace:

It'll sit in the smaller chicken yard and be about two feet tall by a foot and a half long and a foot and a half deep. The door will double as the steps down, and the roof will lift off for cleaning. It'll have the same wood-slat floor that allows the droppings to fall through, and it won't be fastened to the ground so that we can move it from place to place.

The only thing the Sultan lacks is a turban. I think it might be a great idea to plant a turban squash plant just outside the chicken yard for him.

They Don't Have Military School For Chickens

I've done it. I've posted an add in the "free" section on craigslist to find Arthur a new home. It's not that we don't love Arthur. How could you not? He's beautiful, he's manly (as far as chickens could be called manly) and he's vocal. But, he's also vying for supremacy with Cargill, and I do feel a certain amount of affectionate loyalty toward the rooster we picked first. Cargill is the much more stately (although YOU can call it "lazy and cowardly" if you like) of the two roosters. Maybe it's an innate perception of redheads as being wild and hot-tempered, or maybe it's the fact that half our hen population is going bald from his very claw-and-beaky attentions. Either way, for our sanity and that of the poor hens, I've decided to offer him up. I'd like to think that someone out there is thinking "I'd love to get myself a rooster and have fertile eggs," or "I'd like a nice pet, and a rooster seems just the ticket," but it's just as likely that someone out there is thinking "Gallo viejo es buen caldo." As long as I don't have to swing the hatchet, that's okay.


I took some mug shots of him, just so that propective "buyers" could see that he really is both healthy and beautiful. If only he were as well-behaved as his pictures make him seem, I'd be tempted to keep him.