Run Chicken, Run!

I normally condone animal abuse, but I make an exception for chickens.

Roosters, to be more specific.

If that two-foot-tall pile of feathers wants to come at me with its claws of fury then I will kick that little bugger like a football and feel zero remorse because that furious beastie had it coming, mate.

This is actually a stock chicken picture I pulled from Canva the day I created the blog post. Not one of my chickens, lol

In my years of farm life, I have encountered quite a number of spikey, hate-filled roosters. Some were occasionally violent, only pecking when they felt that you were too close to their hens. A few roosters ignored adults but went after small children, dogs, cats, baby goats, and anything else that they felt they could actually best in a wrestling match.

And then there was Jaco.

Jaco was a beautiful speckled sussex rooster, and his favorite hobby was eating people alive. Not only was he close to three feet in height, he had a nasty habit of flying over the pasture fence and prowling the yard, waiting for some unsuspecting person to come into view.

One of the few (or maybe only) times I heard an adult scream in terror was when a friend who was boarding her horses at my house walked her new horse to the horse pasture...and didn't see the incoming chicken bent on protecting his domain from anything that didn't have a beak and feathers.

Jaco somehow survived a hit-and-run with a bike, a shovel-wielding Russian, and numerous "yeet him into the air like a football" kicks. Not once did he ever limp or get injured...or show signs of remorse for his misdeeds.

Worst of all, this rooster had a soft side. If you could push through his beak-and-nail defenses and get him in your arms, he would turn into a nice little pet. Tuck him under your arm and pet his pretty feathers and feed him some grain and he'd sit there all nice and happy and chuckle to himself while pecking the corn ever-so-sweetly from your palm.

Then place him back on the ground and he'd scuttle over to you, hackles raised...

We gave him away to some hunting friends, and said that we didn't want to know what they were planning to do with him.

None of our roosters since have been quite as mean. We did have a Black Australorp rooster named Toothless that turned mean. We penned him up in a small hutch, claiming he was too pretty to sell or eat (or maybe we just felt a little guilty about Jaco's fate?). Eventually the cow broke the hutch and Toothless was inadvertently freed....and he never bothered to attack us again. Perhaps he learned his lesson.

As of right now, we have two roosters - a Rhode Island Red rooster that is the perfect rooster, and a gray rooster that has never actually /attacked/ but does that little beady-eyed-side-shuffle that you chicken owners know all about. He does jump out of the pasture and lead his little band of freedom flighter hens, but is for the most part, quite docile. I still don't trust him, of course.

Never trust a rooster.

And for anyone wanting a picture, I dug through the computer and managed to find this picture of Jaco himself.