When I got home from work today, he was standing in the backyard, staring at the coop. He was frozen still, waiting on any movement to come out of the door. Once he heard my car door open, he ran towards me, the one person who could help him with his problem.

I had been locking the rooster out of the coop and chicken run during the day because the chicken rape was out of control. My hens had been beaten by him too many times, and one of them was completely bald and limping from his constant assaults. Two days prior to the lock-out, he came after me when my back was turned, particularly because I had chased him off of his main victim, a homely hen I call Lady Lazyrus (LL for short). LL was crying out while he was on top of her, pulling her head feathers out as he beat on her back with his talons. I ran after him with the rake, forcing him off only to have him come after me seconds later. He flew straight at my back, spurs out, ready to pierce. I turned around just in time, rake out, smacking him sideways. The war had begun. And every day after that one was one more day closer to his death sentence.

I started this blog post six months ago, right before the rooster was killed. I still have guilt over his death. I still look for him in my yard every day.

When you’re given baby chicks to raise and keep as your very own, you’re full of hope and promise that what you’ve been given will stay with you for years to come and bring you loads of bounty. I don’t raise chickens for meat; I raise them for eggs, pest control and entertainment. Every chicken I’ve ever had has had its own unique personality. Some chickens are dumber than others, and some are sweeter than cats and dogs, but sometimes there’s the biggest disappointment of all after you’ve raised these babies to adult-sized birds. Sometimes they grow into roosters. And then you’re stuck.

Unless you like roosters. Or you may get a kind, gentle rooster. I had one of those once, and he was the best rooster anyone had ever seen, until a horse kicked him. That was 30 years ago.

A year prior to the rooster coming after me, I had been given four Americauna chicks. They had been dropped off at the local animal shelter and nobody wanted them. A recent zoning rule had been passed in that town, not allowing more than 3 chickens to one household in the city limits. I lived in the county and didn’t have any chickens at the time, so I figured why not.

Right away you could tell that one of them was a rooster. That little red comb and gangly tail was a dead giveaway. And there was another one that could go either way, so we named it RuPaul and waited to see what would come out. Eventually it cockledoodled and we had our answer: 2 out of 4 were roosters, which was 2 roosters too many for me.

But I wanted to give them a chance. I had read about some Americaunas being good roos, and I thought maybe I would get a good one. Out of the two, at least one had to be nice, right? So I waited and watched, and saw that one was better with the hens than the other one, and one was nicer to me than the other one, which made the decision really tough. Did it matter if the rooster was nice to me and not to the hens, or vice versa? I decided that the one that was nice to the hens should stay, and the one that liked me, my RuPaul, would go live with my mom. Her roo had just been killed by a raccoon so she needed something to keep her girls safe.

Three months after I gave mom RuPaul, my rooster, Jason, was raping the hens at such a rate I thought he was going to kill all of them before I could get any eggs. He would see one, his favorite, walking towards me for some scratch, and he would head her off by jumping on her and pulling out her feathers as he penetrated. It was always such a violent act to witness that I wondered why anyone would want to keep roosters to begin with. How could this be healthy for the hens?

Once Jason started coming after me, I realized he had to go. I put an ad on Craigslist and posted a photo to the Tractor Supply, trying to spare his life and give him to someone who wouldn’t mind his temperament.  But he was a big rooster, and most people knew that he was probably an asshole. Not that I lied and said he was the best rooster a flock could hope for, but he wasn’t a bad rooster when it comes to what roosters are supposed to do, and that is protect the hens. This guy protected the hens, and then some. But no one wanted him. So I did what I knew had to be done: I asked a friend to kill him for me.

When you’ve raised an animal from its infancy and you realize that you can no longer be in its presence safely, then you must ask yourself if this animal is safe anywhere. Should it  continue to exist? Of course, a lot of opinions about the rooster were given to me once I admitted that I could no longer keep it. One friend wanted to rehabilitate it so that it wasn’t so mean, so unpredictable. Apparently you can train roosters to be nicer, despite the DNA that tells the rooster to fight, fight, fight. Lots of websites were sent to me by this earnest friend, trying to convince me to not give up. Just like the churches that promise to un-gay people, this guy wanted me to un-cock my rooster. So I tried it for two weeks until I realized that there was no turning this one. He was the meanest cock you’ve ever seen. You can’t just turn off mother nature.

Another friend wanted me to drop the rooster off at a farm, just any farm, and maybe they will take it in, like a kitten or a lamb.

My mother told me to leave it out at night and “let nature take its course”.

And another friend’s boyfriend offered to kill it and eat it, so I went with that option.  I didn’t want his life to be given to some lazy possum that stumbled upon him in the woods at night. And he was my responsibility and not my trash to dump on someone’s property. I hated the thought of killing him, but I was terrified of him, and the more I lived in that fear the more I let go of my role in his death. It was not my fault he was such a jerk. It was not my fault he was such a… rooster. Besides, he was just a chicken. Some people eat the equivalent of 2 chickens in one day. Why was I having such a hard time over the life of 1 chicken?

Because he was my chicken. He was my mean, crazy rooster, that I held in my hand when he was small and pulled twigs out of his feathers when he got stuck in a brush pile, and protected every night by closing and locking a door that kept predators from eating him, and here I was, his keeper, feeding him to a stranger because he no longer behaved like a pet.

He’s just a chicken.

The day he was killed I hyperventilated from crying too much. He was scared right before it happened. That image- his clear fear- is burned into my brain and I can’t unsee it when I look at the spot where he died. He knew it was about to happen. And I let it happen, right before me, the person who raised him. For weeks after, I would cry when I saw his feathers, I would cringe when I didn’t hear him in the mornings, and I would apologize to the hens who searched for him all over the yard.

The hen that he was the cruelest to, the one he had maimed, didn’t come out of the coop for two days after he was killed. She sat in the corner and cried and cooed, mourning her cruel lover.

He was just a chicken.