Animal Welfare United States Project #35495

The Rooster Project

by VINE

Project Report | May 10, 2019
Springtime for Roosters

By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary

Greetings, and thank you again for supporting The Rooster Project.

Springtime seems to bring higher spirits for everybody, and that includes roosters. At our sanctuary in Vermont as well as our satellite refuge for roosters in Maryland, roosters have been stretching their bright feathers in the sun and eagerly exploring the increasingly green pastures and foraging yards. We feel hopeful too, but also soberly aware of how much more work we will need to do to make the world safer for them.

As usual, spring has brought an uptick in calls, from both individuals and other sanctuaries, for help with problematic rooster behavior. When I heard myself answering the same question for the third time in a week, I realized that we needed a quick and easy way to share answers to FAQs widely. And so, while continuing to move toward publication of our long-form handbook on rooster care as well as the online "rooster wiki" for shelters and sanctuaries, we set up an online discussion group that is open not only to shelters and sanctuaries but also to individuals who care for roosters in their homes.

If any of those categories includes you, you can join that group here.

Looking ahead, everything seems to take longer than we estimate (which I guess is not surprising given everything we are trying to do simultaneously) but we do have a hard deadline of the National Animal Rights Conference in late June for the publication of both the manual and the rooster myths and facts brochure, so that we can use the ocassion of that event to directly give those materials to the many other sanctuaries that will be present.

In the meantime, thank you again for supporting The Rooster Project. As a reward to yourself for that generosity, please follow the lead of our fine-feathered friends and take yourself outside into the spring sunshine sometime soon!

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Feb 7, 2019
Rooster Project Update

By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary

Nov 12, 2018
Ready for Roosters!

By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary

New Rooster Coop

Greetings and thank you again for supporting The Rooster Project by VINE Sanctuary on GlobalGiving.

We have exciting news: As promised, our new satellite refuge for roosters is ready to welcome birds! We’ve built the coop and fenced the foraging yards and are right now making arrangements for the first bird to arrive. We’ll have a “grand opening” in the spring, at which point we will also have signage and literature available on site.

This new satellite refuge will be operated by Aram, a longstanding VINE community member who is a trained veterinary technician with many years of experience in caring for roosters. The location is on Smith Island on the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland — a region dominated by the poultry industry. From spring through fall, tourists visit the island, strolling a route that will take them past the new rooster refuge. So, in addition to saving lives, the new refuge will promote compassion for roosters in a region where chickens are especially persecuted.

This is the first of three elements of the first phase of The Rooster Project. The other elements of the first phase, a rooster manual for sanctuaries and humane authorities and a “wiki” for sanctuaries, also are on track. We’ve begun work on the manual and expect to publish it by the end of the year, as promised. The wiki for sanctuaries will take a bit longer than planned, but for a very good reason: In consultation with advisors and other sanctuaries, we have identified a few additional features that will make this resource even more useful. Implementing those features will add a few weeks to the timeline for that project, and we now anticipate it going live in the first weeks of February.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2019, we will need to keep the crowdfunding going, as we have not yet secured the funds for the next phases of The Rooster Project, which will both increase the capacities of sanctuaries and reduce rooster homelessness by intervening in the problems that lead roosters to be exploited and abandoned.

So, please do tell your friends about your support for The Rooster Project. Even if they are not inspired to give, you will have become an even bigger part of The Rooster Project by helping to dispel the myths that lead roosters to be so endangered.

Thank you again, and I look forward to letting you know when the next part of The Rooster Project is ready to go.

Aram

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