I drove past the local tip the other day and noticed that the flock of roosters foraging in the paddock below it had grown. I had just assumed that some of the nearby farmer’s chooks had decided that there was better forage at the tip and that last season his girls had hatched out lots of roosters.
I was appalled to discover that people have been dumping the roosters there. I knew that people dumped kittens at the tip but the thought of going to all the trouble of catching a rooster and then just throwing it away shocked me.
There have been a lot of new people move here in the past ten years or so, city people looking for a treechange, mainlanders mostly, attracted to the cheap land and easy commute to the city.
I can wholly appreciate the excitement of finally having a bit of land with space for a few chickens, mmm think of all the lovely fresh eggs. And it seems to be all fine and dandy until the novelty wears off and the bloody chickens scratch your garden to pieces or a hen goes broody and hatches out a clutch of roosters. What do you do then?
Apparently you just throw the fucking roosters away. Aaargh!
It is the waste of all that good meat that does my head in, as well as the casual cruelty.
There are a number of tangents that I could spin off into here, I could pull out my soapbox and have a little rant about ethical treatment of animals and our responsibilities to our livestock.
I could blather on about the environmental damage that wild chickens do to the fragile landscape.
Or I could lead into a discussion about throw away roosters being the least of our problems in this 21st century, when we already have a well established tradition of throwing away the most vulnerable of all in this society of ours. Our elderly and our disabled, our mentally ill and our useless are all thrown away.
Not to the tip, like the roosters but our broken ones are marginalised and pushed to the very edges of society. Our elderly are packed off to sub standard and under funded nursing homes. Our indigenous are demonised and our leaders shame themselves and us as a nation, by loudly trying to “Stop the Boats”, when that tiny percentage of desperate people is the least of our problems.
Now I have run out of steam and the early morning daylight is filling the sky with interesting colours. I will gather up the camera and see if the play of light through the gum trees chases away these dark thoughts of mine.
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I was encouraged to get some chooks for my yard a while ago, as I have loads of pests and was told they would clean them up… I was advised not to get a rooster.
I confess that I could never bring myself to kill an animal, for food or otherwise, and I have suspected for a long time that despite people saying they’d never go vegetarian, they probably would if they had to kill their own animals.
We’re so separated from nature now, that it’s easy to forget where meat really comes from, it’s something that I try to put out of my mind when I buy it.
Perhaps people don’t consider the consequences enough, I have, and I don’t want chooks in the yard, because I know, even now, that I couldn’t handle it.
Wolfie!
I think that you would probably do well with some Muscovy ducks Wolfie. They are great in the garden and not nearly as destructive as chooks and they make lovely pets because they have so much character.
I used to go hunting and fishing with my father from a very young age. So eating meat that we have killed ourselves has always been part of my heritage. I really, really dislike eating “bought meat” that really goes against the grain.
I think that there is a growing awareness of just how disconnected we have become and there is a gradual movement back to a more ethical way of doing things. I have been talking about ethical food production for twenty years now and I am pleased that finally it doesn’t feel like I am talking to myself any more
Ducks would be nice, as you know, I have been looking after a young magpie lately, who is a handful, but she’s great to have in the garden, and very friendly.
I don’t have a dam though, being a city boy, and I feel that ducks really need that.
As for me eating meat, I feel it comes down to being lazy, and I admit that I am a lazy sort of person.
Being vegetarian seems to mean a lot of food preparation, and would eat into my online time and so forth. (I hate washing dishes, so if warming something up is an option, I’ll take it).
But I have a lot of guilt over eating meat, and I just put this aside for convenience… it’s not the best option.
I have become almost unsurprised by people’s uncaring attitudes to the welfare of anyone or anything other than themselves. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard for people who keep poultry to find some one to take the unwanted roosters! Can you send David over to the tip with his trusty gun to bag a few for the pot or would this not be allowed?
This is entirely a by-the-way question but what would eat or kill ‘green-ly’ the bloody awful hoards of black millipedes that we get here? None of the birds in our garden touch them, the crows or magpies, which seem to eat everything else from the insect world, look and turn away. When it’s damp here after the somewhat infrequent rain, a pair of wild ducks waddle over our way from the lake but I can’t say I’ve seen them eating the millipedes either. In fact even the ants give them a wide berth – dead or alive! While we do use a barrier spray fairly regularly this has had little effect and we have resorted to using huge quantities of spray to kill them off over the past couple of weeks. Poor hubby has had to go out at night several times to sweep them away from the house and spray the buggers because they’re getting into the house through the sliding doors – and I’m not talking about 1 or 2 either! The numbers are slowly dwindling now but each year has been worse than the last, so I reckon next year we’ll be knee deep in them unless I find a better control method. Help!!!
@ Sharon, I had thought of that but the tip lady (caretaker) is feeding the roosters so they wont starve to death. The birds etc are avoiding the Portuguese millipedes because they have a toxic/smelly repellant that they use when they are threatened. here is a link to a WA ag site with some more info about them but their control methods seem to be pretty toxic. We get them here and I just ignore them or scoot them out of my way with my foot when I am in the bathroom as they seem to like my shower.
At first I thought you were going to rant about people throwing away repairable items and buying new, or maybe wasting food, but this is worse. Live animal dumping is an outrage. I’m sure there are farms around that would gladly have taken the roosters, if only for the pot.
That’s shocking. I don’t know what else to say really.
I’d take them for the pot if I were there, although I’d get Dad to help with the killing and plucking, I’m not too good with that bit.
But when you think of it as free whole chooks in your freezer, it sounds good.
Obviously not everyone can think like that (animals as food) and unfortunately sometimes even when you call places and put advertisements out there you still can’t get rid of them, it’s very sad.
I’ve rang around about a pair of stray cats who were homeless and no one wanted a bar of them, not even the RSPCA or cats home who were both full. The people who lived in our house before us left them and I couldn’t have them because I’m allergic.
I sense, I hope, that there is a pendulum swing that will occur, in which we realize that the best thing we can do in our lives is take care of each other. Take care of each other and where we live.
http://www.pampersandpinot.com
I’m the same as Wolfie. I never felt quite right about eating meat, so I recently went vegetarian. Or pescetarian to be precise. It is more work though.