After calling the non-emergency number for our local police department and talking to our local community affairs officer (it was either that, animal control, report a crime, or please hold for someone in dispatch) I have a definitive answer on what we can do with our roosters (and I think some of you are not going to like the answer.)
We can ethically kill (slaughter) them to our heart’s content.
After hearing from the police officer that there was no law on the books about killing chickens (read that again for all of you out there who think this is cruel (which to some degree I agree with you) and that it should be reported) we are making plans to go forward this weekend.
Chickens are considered livestock and you have the right to kill them and eat them if you want. “People have been doing it forever to survive” the kindly officer reminded me.
As a note – I wouldn’t be able to sell the meat because that would mean I would have to be inspected by the FDA and let’s not even go near that giant mess right now. Instead, do yourself a favor and read the book Folks, this ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin, he does a much better job than I will ever be able to of explaining the absurdity around the FDA. (and I’m pretty sure I just got put on the No-fly list for that last sentence.)
There are a few things I want to put on the table (none of which include a chicken carcass):
I teach workshops on backyard chickens. How to handle roosters is a question that constantly comes up. My short answer is that if you are raising chickens in an urban setting – you have an obligation to not have roosters. Roosters make a lot of noise. They crow in the morning (just like in cartoons) but they also crow at 2:30 am (not often seen in cartoons.) When neighbors need to get to work in the morning this can be a problem. 3 of our neighbors love our rooster’s crow, it reminds them that they live near nature. 2 of our neighbors hate our rooster’s crow, it reminds them that they live near hell.
And because I advocate that one shouldn’t have roosters around when one has neighbors (when I upgrade to a house on a 10 acre lot I’ll keep all the roosters I want) I need to also teach people how to ethically get rid of roosters. I’d rather have an ethical kill than find a rooster tied in a bag at the bottom of the river. So that’s why we (Marc and Trevor) are going forward with this.
Some of you might bring up that if we were going to kill them what were we doing with roosters in the first place? I’ve written about it before but with baby chicks, unless they are sex-linked (all girls are born one color, all boys another) there is really no way to figure out if you have a boy chick or not. (you can look at the butt but I haven’t been able to do that well (although I’ve tried).) Some of our roosters were mistakes, chicks that we were “assured” were females were not. This particular rooster is one from the set of eggs we incubated this spring. There might be another rooster in the batch, it’s just too early to tell yet. The rotten thing about roosters is that they tend to be some of the most handsome birds in the flock, it’s a shame to lose them, if we could only teach the males to keep their mouths shut, the world would be such a better place.
As always, will keep you updated.
As an extra treat, click here to hear our rooster strutting his stuff. (as it turns out in the upload I lost a crow so check back and I’ll post another video with more delightful crowing)
Update: Here is another video of our bad boy singing the blues.
