Several times a week, sometimes daily, we receive a telephone call or email message asking if we can make room for another rooster.

This demand is driven by the backyard chicken-keeping craze. People buy chicks for the fun of raising them to be egg-laying hens. Even though hatcheries ruthlessly exterminate any chicks believed to be male, some of the chicks inevitably grow up to be roosters. Sometimes the hen-keepers themselves don't want the roosters. Other times, neighbors complain about crowing or local regulations specifically prohibit roosters. 



Nobody is more dedicated to roosters than we. When the first chicken we rescued from the roadside on the Delmarva peninsula turned out to be a rooster, we began to wonder where our ideas about roosters came from. As we met more and more roosters who had escaped the local poultry industry, each with his own personality, we became more and more sure that common ideas about roosters were rooted in gender stereotypes rather than actual bird behavior. (Our cofounder, pattrice jones, has written and spoken about this extensively, most recently in a new volume on Ecofeminism.)

Next, in flew two dozen bright-feathered roosters who had all been living together, sleeping in trees and taking shelter in an open barn, at an informal sanctuary run by a humane officer who had elected, over the course of several years, to bring unplaceable roosters home rather than euthanize them. Collectively, this group (which included several roosters of the breeds used in cockfighting) affirmed our hunch that roosters of all varieties could and should be allowed to live together in communities.

 

Those roosters schooled us in the ways by which roosters naturally resolve their disputes. We put that knowledge together with our understanding of psychology to devise a program by which the unsocialized and traumatized roosters used in cockfighting might be rehabilitated. It worked! We also succeeded, over the years, in convincing other sanctuaries to be more welcoming to roosters. Some have even joined us in undertaking the rehabilitation of roosters used in cockfighting.

But, at the same time as we were working out how to save a small fraction of the roosters confiscated from cockfighting every year, a new and even more lethal trend was gaining steam: The fad for backyard hen-keeping.

Watch our blog for a forthcoming analysis of this craze, which is fueled by both current trends and ancient stereotypes. Suffice it to say, for now, that we and every other sanctuary offering refuge to chickens is now inundated by a never-ending stream of requests to take in unwanted, abandoned, or otherwise imperiled roosters.

 

It might be hard for outsiders to understand the scope of this. Online, at least two thirds of people using VINE's "Contact Us" page do so to ask us to take in roosters. Telephone calls to the sanctuary are similarly skewed. 

While some callers are Good Samaritans trying to help roosters who have crossed their paths, most are keepers of egg-laying hens. They do not say sorry. They do not offer to surrender the hens along with the rooster. They consider themselves exemplary people for trying to "save a rooster from the soup pot," and make it clear that this will be the fate of the bird if we do not find room for him.

Our space and resources are not infinite. Again and again, we have expanded to make room for more roosters. Despairing of ever regaining a healthy gender balance, we violated our own principle of offering every sanctuary resident the chance to pursue the full range of relationships and created a sex-segregated rooster-only flock "up the hill." (Those birds can and do forge friendships with turkeys, peacocks, guinea fowl, geese, and ducks, but we know they would be happier if their lives included hens too.) We're more-or-less constantly full, with only attrition creating space for more roos. 

And still the calls and messages continue. Can you imagine how anguishing it is to say "no"?

 

Even if we had the funds and space to build yet another coop just for roosters, it would quickly fill up and we would be back where we began. Building more and more coops and more sanctuaries can only ever be a stop-gap solution.

We need to make a new push against the backyard hen trend. You can help. We need volunteers, donors, and signal boosters to help us implement a tripartite strategy intended to (1) undermine the forces that make people want to keep hens for eggs, (2) make it more difficult for them to do so, and (3) divert their energies into healthy and humane activities such as veganic gardening, wild bird rehabilitation, and establishing backyard wildlife refuges. 

• We need volunteers to work online and in their own communities. If you have some hours to spare and have been looking for a project, please reply to this newsletter. We'll send you a more detailed overview of our strategy, along with our volunteer needs, so that you can decide where you might fit in.

• We need donors to help cover the costs of this effort. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation to our campaigns fund.

• We need signal boosters to help us spread the word (or write letters themselves) whenever we need people from a particular city or state to write to newspapers or legislators. Click here to sign up for VINE action alerts, which are sent out separately from our newsletter and blog.

We'll also be inviting other sanctuaries, including those who participated in our previous push against this fad, to join us. Together, we can turn the tide against a trend that has deluged shelters and sanctuaries all over the country with more roosters than we can house.

 

 

P.S. We also need help in supporting all of the roosters already living here at the sanctuary. Just $5 a month covers the cost of feed and bedding. Click here to sign up to sponsor a rooster, and you will receive a photo and regular updates about your new feathered friend.