By pattrice jones | VINE Sanctuary co-founder & Coordinator
Spring has sprung here at VINE Sanctuary, and that means that roosters are rowdy. They're not the only ones! As snowy yards and frigid temperatures are replaced by warmer days and emerging greenery, everybody at the sanctuary experiences a bit of spring fever. It's sometimes cacophonous but always delightful to see.
Unfortunately, early spring is also the time of year when people who keep backyard hens for their eggs buy chicks from hatcheries or farm stores. Sadly, that makes spring the season of dead roosters, orphan chicks, and unhappy hens.
Farm stores souce their chicks from hatcheries, many of which also sell chicks by mail. All chicks hatched in incubators rather than under their mother's wings come into the world afraid and alone, with only other frightened chicks for comfort and company. Then, they are sorted, with roosters killed immediately and often by gruesome methods. The surviving hens (and rooters who were mistyped) then are shipped or mailed to farm stores and individual consumers. Many die along the way.
We've summarized these and other harms on an easy-to-understand webpage, which we encourage you to share with anyone you know who keeps or is thinking of keeping backyard hens for their eggs. The page includes other things to do instead, such as making your yard a refuge for wild birds and learning to cook without eggs.
The next sad season begins when the people who buy chicks in the spring discover that some of them are roosters. Depending on their breed, roosters begin crowing between three and six months of age, when they reach the equivalent of adolescence. That's when the calls to surrender roosters, which go on all year long, become a flood.
Because our space and funds are not infinite, we have a protocol for dealing with such calls. People want to surrender roosters for all sorts of reasons. Many believe the stereotypes about roosters or don't know how to deal with behavior problems. Others live in towns that allow hens but ban roosters. Some have a partner or neighbor who is threatening to kill the bird. Our protocol prioritizes roosters in life-or-death situations while encouraging people who could keep the bird in question to do so.
No matter how well we do at explaining the realities of roosters or helping to solve behavioral problems, there are some birds who will die if we don't take them.
So, last week at the sanctuary, we had an all-staff meeting to figure out how to handle this year's influx of rooster surrender requests. We've only just now cleared last year's waiting list, so it will be challenging! But we are as ready as we can be.
We want other sanctuaries to be ready too, so we have made a script and flowchart of our protocol to share with other sanctuaries. After a few sanctuaries of various sizes beta test it, we will distribute it more widely.
Thank you again for your support of The Rooster Project. To end on a glad note, see the snapshot below. It's not much of a phosograph in the artistic sense, but it shows the everyday amity of roosters here at the sanctuary. In it you can see four roosters who share a coop with hens and other roosters. The largest of them, Snickers, is a former fighting rooster. Thanks to donors like you, they all are enjoying a happy spring at the sanctuary!
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By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary
By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary
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