A Sock Full of Quarters

If I had invested the sock full of quarters Mr. LaRoy doled out by the fistful for my college education instead of spending it to buy the first car that picked me up when I ran off from Aunt Sammy's farm, I would probably have enough now for a year at Cornell.
But that old Hudson did get me as far as Almost-Wyoming, Colorado, and over the years I have happened onto a fortune in free education, which includes living intimately with pigeons and books while embedded in the Cornell Library attic.
And after a another bunch of years mostly without books, I've gained this reconditioned I Book and the convenience of an extension cord to Davey's house.... so I'm really getting a load of new, world knowledge - with a concentration on the nature and culture of chickens, as it relates to the problems where I am at.
At Davey's troubled chicken republic.

The Descent of Chicken

Searching through recent chicken science news, I learn that, according to the associate keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum in London, Angela Milner - here commenting on the just completed genome sequencing of Tyranasorus Rex:
"The analysis shows that T-rex collagen makeup is almost identical to that of a modern chicken. This corroborates a huge body of evidence from the fossil record that demonstrates birds are descended from meat-eating dinosaurs,"

Now when you remove the feathers, it's easy to see just how much a chicken (like this one engineered for the meat trade in Israel) is like a T. Rex . Dogs will eat corn and there is plenty of it in their food, but Chickens are not meat eaters simply by virtue of the stray bugs on their greens. They are deliberate hunters and proud of it. If you look at most rooster beaks, you will see that they are more hooked like that of a hawk than straight like a finch beak.
Our chickens will run down and kill and kill and kill a mouse for about ten minutes, then run back and forth through the flock with it before tearing out and eating the entrails or leaving the corpse as a public monument in the middle of the path.

And anyone with chickens on the loose learns that roosters will tyranize and terrorize you if you allow it. Maybe they will even peck out your eyes and your entrails too, as some Jihadists have recently threatened to arrange for their own roosters to do to infidels without borders .
Anthropologists have observed that chickens were first domesticated, not for their eggs or meat, but because of their fighting ability.
That says a lot about both our species, but this superior fighting ability has got to be partly due to roosters having a testosterone level which, according to various sources, is from fourteen to seventeen times that of your average human male. Damn!
In the zoological branch of traditional Chinese pharmacology, eating Rooster balls, especially the black-meated variety, is a boost to human male potency. But, judging by roosters, roostosterone might also diminish your ability to separate love from war.
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According to an online guide to Tagalog style cock fighting culture, extensive culling of the cockerls is necessary in order to eliminate "Crossed-up chickens and those that are too brainy, stylishly evasive or defensive."
These brainy, stylishly evasive and defensive characteristics have survived because they are useful for political functioning and for the survival of the species. Whereas the aggressively bred fighting cock might be better fit for the entertainment of the bloody minded, or for use by the growing torture industry, but are tragically flawed - not fit to survive in nature.
Tyranasourus Rex didn't survive as such did he....except by getting small, defensive, and brainy.
Developing feathers and wings had to help too,

Courageous, Generous, Dazed, and Confused

In the traditions of Asia Major where they appeared before even little yellow people, chickens, and roosters in particular, are the traditional icons not so much off ferocity, as of contrary benevolent qualities. Humans would be lucky to have such well meaning friends, family members, and neighbors of such rich character and intelligent awareness as is attributed to chickens:
as in various summations of the Chinese astrological animal traditions, where the rooster epitomizes Courage; Generosity; Punctuality; Benevolence; and Wisdom ,
or
"-intelligence, chivalry, bravery, trustworthiness and benevolence"
And according to a modern evaluation, " honesty, ambition, curiosity, confidence, good judgment, self-reliance, courage, fear of commitment and dedication"
" Roosters" says that source, " are also eccentric deep thinkers and moody loners who always think they’re right" .

A Rooster, somebody out there generalizes, is * Intelligent, perceptive, honest, (has) excellent memory, (is) alert, organized, generous, attractive, confident performer ."
Never mind a few shady characteristics, that's already way beyond the requirements for an Eagle Scout .
Maybe we have even bred some of that good stuff into the birds. Maybe we project some and idealize a lot.
The punctuality of roosters is a myth for sure. (Our neighbors for a mile around know that our roosters crow at all hours of the day and night) .
I am foggy about the " fear of commitment" characterization, and I really doubt the honesty claim....... Roosters are probably more sincere than the human animal, but I don't trust one never to deceive.

There is definitely dark side to roosters, including not only their naked will to power, but their petty tendencies to be " boastful , showoffs, opinionated, critical" and much worse.
Some think them to be literally devilish, and can point to their often very red eyes. You should notice that some are brown eyed, and that if a red-eye pales it is because the bird has poor circulation, not because of a good heart.
The fact is that roosters signal everything all the time, long distance and close up, with their crowing and posturing. They will stand inflated on a hillock for long periods, and if they could, would hang flapping six feet up in the air with wings and talons extended like the eagle on a flag.
Small children - who are sensitive to obvious body language which people not so close to the ground don't notice - are often deathly afraid of roosters; and kids who have been attacked by roosters, even if they have not been eviscerated, are often afraid of all chickens, if not all birds, for the rest of their lives.
In Medieval times an unlucky rooster was even tried, convicted, and burnt at the stake for practicing witchcraft. In his case, he was accused of laying eggs. Maybe he/she did.
If all the cocks here at Roosterdorf, who weigh up to nine or ten pounds, would lay eggs, we would have a peck of quarter-pounders every day and a bushel of money by the end of the year.

The wild world net says that Romanian farmers have at some point made a practice of feeding their roosters alcohol soaked grain to make them go broody and tend to to eggs and chicks, which even some hens will not do. So the accused medieval Warlock may have been only a drunk rooster, but I don't think for a minute that roosters are incapable of witchcraft. Witchcraft , when it is not being good, iis basically intimidation , and roosters prefer intimidation to actual fighting. They will try to scare you to death.
There is evil in them for sure and I expect that if you were to give him alcohol any particular rooster would be just as likely to get very bitchy as he woiuld to get broody, and that most likely he would do like the rooster who comes up when I search "drunken rooster": a rooster belonging to some jungle missionaries, to whom someone fed a fermented pineapple.
He ran around wildly crowing and singing for an hour or so, then fell down, passed out, and got up later dazed and confused.

Beauties and Fiends

Charles Darwin, a great observer of mating fowls, reported that for cocks courting, “beauty is even sometimes more important than success in battle.”
But the typical list of rooster virtues often leaves out (and maybe just takes for granted) that most obvious quality of roosters.The personal choices of hens have been developing rooster beauty since feathers began. Human breeders have tried to advance and elaborate upon it, but the breeders and the hens more or less agree on absolute Beauty, even though neither they nor I can define it. Nobody really thinks that the fourteen inch fingernails on the emperor's uncle, or the twelve foot tail on a Japanese trophy Rooster is more beautiful than nails that can fret a lute or a tail the bird can hold high. . And neither would be an asset in the act of mating or all out battle.
You can see the beauty factor working right here in Chicken town.
From the roost of nineteen roosters, Eric the Aracuna is the first choice of four or five out of our twelve hens, though his beauty is subtle and we might expect them to prefer gaudy George, the other Aracuna rooster.
Aracunas are named after the Chilean Indian tribe which was discovered by the Spanish to be raising them. Long before the Mayflower and the European ancestors of our Plymouth Rocks, Eric's fore-birds came across the Pacific as contributing passengers in Polynesian sea canoes. I myself used to take my hen Miss Kitty on canoe travels and she always wanted to ride on the bow, even though she had had to flap constantly to say aboard, and it would have so much easier to sit on a thwart. She was a great and eager traveler. I know of a hen who roosted on the warm engine block of a pick-up truck one winter night, and the next day rode twenty miles into Ithaca , where she was found wandering the streets with scorched fee.
Anyway, The Aracuna Indians of Chile who met and ate or traded with the Polynesians, and adopted their chickens , bred them forward to be wily, inconspicuous hens (who would evade predators and lay colored eggs) and bearded, milld-mannered, defensive males who would distract predators and win females, but not attack people. These are my kind of chickens. I am not put off by the fact that the hens also are bearded.
Gorgeous George is vainer than Eric and more likely to start fights, or pile on to fights in progress, and often ends up on top of the chicken house after the others try to pull out his hackles and tread on him. Then he stays up there to display and crow. He is great to look at, but his best assets may be his lack of an easy- to-grab comb, his open-field running skill, and his flightiness. These are all characteristics also of the Aracuna hens, especially chicken Honey, who is the first to leave the hen house and the last to return. She's built for speed and can shoot right between the legs of any inflated rooster.

Eric the red Aracuna not only has a subtler beauty than his cousin George, but he also brainier and more stylishly defensive. But both of them, are low in the male pecking order, particularly Eric who is right down there with the Dominikers and is more persecuted..
The persecution of Eric is due to yet another quality of roosters which needs to be added to the list : Namely, Enviousness.
Lyndon Johnson, that America President who most resembled a rooster and who certainly had a bag full of barn yard analogies, remarked that the two things most likely to bring political ruin, are sex and envy. He might have said the same thing about Roosters. Maybe he did.

The eighteen other roosters in his roost envy Eric his beauty and his success with the hens. Some of the others only succeed in mating when they way- lay the hens as they are trying to get in the door to roost in the evening, just like they try to punk the resented Eric on his way home. The others have to screw each other, or fight among themselves for seconds with unwilling hens. They can't feel good about this. A rooster's beauty is as important not just for his mating success, but because of his vanity , which is tied up with his dignity and pride. And then comes humility. Humility appears when dignity has been trampled and plucked, ....or when posturing becomes real fighting and someone looses.....or both loose, as seems to be the case with two of the lower status cocks of Dot's flock of six. They got into a fight with each other last night , bloodied each other , and are now keeping closer company in shared misery and common understanding.
Eric has his quiet dignity, his mild mannered beauty, and only one Dominiker for a friend. I have more than once had to rescue Eric from the gang bangers and shove him in Davey's house. When I put Eric in the house, Davey gives him a rubber salamander, which Eric murders for ten minutes without doing it any harm, but it restores his dignity some.

Have I mentioned that roosters are sex fiends?
Not always, not necessarily, not all the time, but way beyond your teenage dreams.
Chickens in locked houses are like co-ed prison populations. The roosters serially tread and retread every hen that tries to get to the food or water.
After the murder rape of a Dominiker hen I tacked bin lids over the passages between the main hen house and the south room, where, for now, the roosters now roost all by them selves.

The Lesson of Orphan Island

No functrional culture of humans or chickens is based only on uneducated natural instinct. Culture has to be carefully taught. Preferablly by family.
Just imagine what it must have been like on Big Orphan Island in Lake Bonaparte in the mid nineteenth century when an absentee developer Richard Orphington living in Philadelphia, legally *adopted" an entire Irish orphanage, minus the staff and infrastructre, met them at Ellis Island and transported them by train to Natural Bridge and Lake Bonapaerte, planning that the orphans would themselves clear the land, build shelter, grow potatoes, and sustain themselves to the point of real productivity, which by his calculaltions, and according to his need, should have happened within five or six years.
Needless to say, Big Orphan (formerly Bear Head) island a was less fit for agriculture than lreland had ever been; beavers ate what few potatoes were raised, and when winter came
the children were living in something which looked like a blowdown more than like anything as sophisticated even as a beaver lodge, or as sheltering as the porcupine cave they had to back into to keep out of the wind. That winter the orphaans ate the lone porcupine, fought over the tail, and stewed the quills, gnawed bark.
It was a real sad chapter and also needless to say, before a full year was up, children were eating children, and by the third year, only the monster children remained and they were doomed. About the only right thing in the whole brief history of the Orphan Island Experiment, is what the last of the orphan Cannibals did to the developer
But it is a too familiar story, and may be better forgotten. Anyway, we don't need to get into that watery horror here. The Lake is haunted enough as it is.
Moving on....the point is that what these orphans needed, besides food, shelter, and the caring which they did not receive.....was to be shown the way to work and cooperate; the way to survive, the way to be.
If you know about that awful era on Big Orphan Island, you can imagine Davey's experiment here in raising motherless chicks.
We have here a chicken culture without a chicken cultural past: no chicken elders, no role modlels other than dogs. When Davey isn't inside pretending to write a novel while he checks out Youtube, he is always pushing a wheel barrow to move shit and holes. Chickens do not connect with this behavior. They scatch up his dirt and perch on the barrow, but you never see a chicken try to push a wheel barrow, and it is a good thing. And there is me to model after , yes, but I don't pretend to be a chicken.
For the sake of the chickens, I pretend to be a lynx. A lynx who has adopted them.
I could never be a chicken, especially a mother. I just don't want to be, and so don't a lot of hens, that don't go broody. What a job! At the startout level you have to sit on eggs all but half an hour a day, all the time keeping your own temperature up to a hundred and nineteen degrees to incubate the things. And when they hatch out, they are all over you like a plague.

Roostosterone Shampoo

Considering the abrasivness of their personalities, it is surprising to see how well, and with how very little loss of feathers the roosters are coming through the winter.
Unlike the hens, hey have more or less sorted things out among themselves. They have agreed to roost in peace and fight only in the open where there is a possibility of escape, and most of that is just posturing. Sometimes they will freeze beak to beak for minutes at a time, until one can't keep his hackles up any longer.
I do what I can to model behavior, to cultivate the top roosters, and tame the timorous ones, but the relative mildness of the roosters now might have something to do with the fact that I have developed a technique for milking them.
I don't know if Mr. LaRoy did it this way, but have done it regularly and successfully for the last month and a half.
No, I am not going to reveal the technique here, and you would not much enjoy doing it anyway.
But a good milking sure cools a rooster for a half hour or so, which has at least helped gain time for them to work out the power struggles themselves. I will need to pick up the pace when things warm up another twenty degrees and the roosters and hens are running together again.

In addition to the calming effect on the roosters, the milking has provided me gobs and gobs of a product for which I personally have no use.
I still don't know to whom or for what purpose old Mr. LaRoy sold the rooster milk he harvested at Aunt Sammy's and other swamp farms, but I prepared fifty bottles of baby shampoo with a dropper each of rooster milk, and advertised them on Ebay for thirty nine bucks a twelve ounce bottle.
The undiluted rooster milk itself would not contain much of any Roostosterone I suppose, and I didn't really claim anything for Roostosterone Shampoo, but it sold out so fast I had to take down the add after a week.
And now, out of forty three customers for Roostosterone Shampoo, I have sixteen begging for more , and insisting that, since starting with the shampoo, they have been able to do startling things you might not even want to do, or to have grown as much as four inches in length or height or both, as well as to have grown hair in unexpected places. The results seem to be very individual.

A customer from Nigeria claims that Roostosterone Shampoo has made him develop the beginnings of fleshy appendages on his head, and even he is pleased with himself and the product. Gross.

What all this tells me, is that the placebo effect is a most powerful thing. These people have allowed themselves to be hypnotized by their own roostosterone thoughts.
I have decided to stay off the net with the shampoo, at least for a while, and I presume that anyone reading about it here has been immunized against the placebo effect by my true confession.





Chicken Radio


Hens are not the better or blander half of the chicken species, with nei ther virtues nor vices of their own. We have a huge Bitchiness problem with the hens here this winter.
If it's a henstrogen problem, I can't very well milk them of it, and it has done no good to lecture them. I do not believe that a roostosterone shampooing would help, because they usually get plenty of the real stuff.
They are not aggressive with me . They aren't coy either. They will even offer themselves to me. They know I am not a rooster, but they don't care. I do. When I lived with beavers, I humped trees, but never a beaver or a chicken.
Only one of the hens actually pecks at me, and she only does it to shake down food.
But among themselves they are more than a little peckishly aggressive..... and less likely than the roosters to leave resentments outside.

This will not be such a problem when it warms up and the hens want to be outside again, but now..... after three months indoors together ......half of them have backs plucked bare by the bigger pecker-hens.
Maybe a little alcohol soaked grain would be good for them. I know it could be good for me in heated quaters, but I think it's likely they would be even more overwhelmed and confused by alcohol than rooster seem to be.
Poultry scientists have discovered that Roosters can tell at a distance which of the other roosters of the flock is crowing, and if they hear a certain rooster crowing from some place away from where his hens are known to be hanging out , the competing rooster will run to mate with the hens while the other is away and still calling his hens. Another thing for sure then, is chickens are really good listeners.
So for now, I have given the hens one of Davey's portable radios, tuned to classic rock. They could have classic, country(said to be prefered by cows) or even the Family Life Network, if they like it. But there is no claim or sign I see that chickens have any capacity for religion or moral choice.