Cock-a-Doodle

I Know Why the Free-Range Cock Crows
© 2009 Ross Williams

Roosters are mean.

They are territorial.

They are aggressive.

Worse, they are single-minded aggressive[1].

They are arrogant, have no discernable memory and no known ability to comprehend reality.

It is only because we want to have some protection from critters for our hens while they roam the yard during the day that the rooster we have has not yet died a violent and bloody death, though it’s been close a few times. The thing has drawn my blood twice, my oldest daughter’s once. It’s stalked my wife on several occasions, and made the mistake of ruffling its feathers at my son – whose rooster it is, by the way – at which time my son took to it with an aluminum baseball bat.

My wife has repeatedly smacked it with the kennel-cleaning shovel. Both my daughters have kicked it, never gracefully, but my youngest runs from it when she’s alone with it in the yard. I routinely punt it across the pasture whenever it comes within boot-swinging range. My son and I have taken to periodic pre-emptive strikes whenever it goes into pre-attack posture just to keep the damned thing humble for a few hours, and our farm-sitter refuses to sit the farm unless we catch it and cage it.

We have saved its neck a dozen or more times from our two bigger dogs who got the stray notion through their wind-swept skulls that they wanted a fresh-kill chicken dinner. I feed it daily before work, and half the time I am thanked by being skulked from behind with its neck feathers fluffed out looking for an opening to slash my leg into ribbons with its spurs. …for the third time.

It refuses to learn that if it would just strut around the yard acting as the front-line deterrent to nosy cats and the occasional coyote but otherwise leaving folks be that we would also leave it alone like we do the hens. Instead, it must act belligerent to any who cross its path which, mostly, are the folks who feed it and save its occasional life.

It has a compulsion to – literally – get its ass kicked by those who are bigger and stronger and have the opposable thumbs necessary to hold shovels and baseball bats as weapons. When pushed or annoyed enough, we accommodate it, and chase it into and through the barn to the pasture where, in a panic, it dodges this way and that to avoid being punted. Sometimes it can’t avoid the boot and ends up flapping and sprawling several feet away in a panicked, clucking heap.

Does it learn? No it does not.

And after each skirmish, after each encounter, it turns around, shakes it’s feathers down, struts off and crows[2]. Loudly.

It is very clearly declaring that it has won the battle. It may have drawn no blood, it may have been booted twenty feet, it may have lost two dozen feathers after being doubled off the wall, it may have no obvious, tangible signs of victory, but by god! it won.

The measure of its winning? it’s still alive. It wasn’t given the brutal death that nature would dictate for it had it attacked, say, a fox, and that many semi-natural people would assume for it, so … therefore … it is the clear victor.

And being so victorious and all, it’s going to let the whole world within earshot know about it. So it crows.

We’ll go out to the pasture to bring a horse in for the farrier, the rooster could be a hundred feet away; we leave the pasture with the horse… the rooster won again! It crows.

We’ll go out to the garden to pick asparagus and the rooster could be nowhere in sight. We go back in the house… the rooster won again! It crows.

It’s almost as if its existence is validated by these battles, real and imaginary. To those unaware of these barnyard dynamics, the rooster is merely making noise; it’s what they do. To those who’ve lived it, fed the cute little chicks[3] from pups, and watched them grow to pullet-dom only to have the two males fight incessantly until one was dead and have the victor turn its attention to every other bipedal life form around it, the rooster is bragging about routinely getting its ass kicked.

Which is funny as hell, cuz there’s no similarity between reality and this bird’s perception of it. It helps that our egos, not to mention our lives, are not affected by idiot poultry posturing, as well.

On the barn floor, though, a rooster who brags like this will draw the attention of every other rooster around. This is why, when there were two roosters in our flock, only one of them crowed. Only one was allowed to crow. It started out being the leghorn, since it was the first to grow up. It was big and strong and repeatedly smacked down the smaller, lighter rhode island red. And crowed about it afterward.

But the red soon grew up itself, and though staying smaller, it became quicker and scrappier, and didn’t like the leghorn crowing all the time. One day I came home from work to hear the red crowing and I looked in the chicken house to discover that the two boys had redecorated – painted the walls with the leghorn’s blood. I found Foghorn under the chicken house, humbled, covered in dried blood and plotting revenge.

…which it attempted to get many times. Every once in a while we’d hear the leghorn crowing[4] and knew that the power balance had shifted once again, but it never lasted for long. The red would soon retake the throne and the leghorn would be silenced. It was silenced for good one cold spring day a few years ago, probably after another of its failed coup attempts.

If we were roosters, we’d have the same visceral reaction every time the remaining rooster strutted around crowing in all its 8-pound glory. We would not simply respond to its aggression or pre-empt its aggressive posturing. We would be obliged to seek it out and kick its ass every time we heard it, for any reason. For that is nature. The real world works that way[5].

And the real world does not simply work that way among arrogant, bombastic birds, either.

Dogs, cats, horses – our two horses have a very clear winner and a very clear loser as well. And people work this way, too, though most of us seem too pious to acknowledge it.

I’ll come in from the pasture in the afternoon, listen to that bird shooting off its mouth, and some days I’ll very distinctly hear Hugo Chavez bragging about how he is defending South American independence from US imperialism[6] … by sending all his oil to Texas because he doesn’t have the knowledge or resources to refine it himself.

Other times I’ll clearly hear the Presley-loving, pompadoured comb-over Li’l Kim gloating about how he has bested the whole world by starving his people to death in order to afford to build a rocket out of spare American parts and bubble gum[7] … which he’ll then point at US forces in South Korea or Japan and crow once again.

Yet other days I’ll hear the unmistakable cackling of Ahmadinejad – who actually looks like a bird – boasting how he’ll blow Israel off the map and anyone else [i.e., the US] who stands in his way[8].

And still other times I’ll hear the sweet melodies of Castro crowing how, even under the barrage of US economic warfare, Cuba is still an independent powerhouse[9] of … of … of cigar rolling, perhaps.

There are others besides these, as well. All, in their own puny, insignificant ways are cocks crowing their magnified importance to a world better than they are, as they strut around the chickenshit barnyards they call home. Each is begging to have his ass kicked by those bigger and stronger and with better weapons and who will one day get tired of listening to them brag.

If we were Martians, it’d be funny as hell.





[1] …to the degree they have minds.
[2] Except, notably, when my son took batting practice on it. It hid for a week.
[3] awwwwww
[4] It had a lilt in its song that the red doesn’t have
[5] In the real world, crowing, bragging or gloating IS aggression.
[6] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518677,00.html
[7] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519418,00.html
[8] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517186,00.html
[9] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/22/fidel-castro-obama-got-overture-wrong/