...hello dinner.
We are down to five chickens. But this last dead chicken was intentional: it was time for the rooster to go. The rooster woke us up with his crowing for the second or third morning in a row before 6 am. The bigger problem is that the chicken coop is equidistant to our neighbor's house, and I hear quiet chickens make good neighbors.
It was time to silence the bird.
Don't we want a rooster, you ask? The short answer: no.
You don't need a rooster for eggs (just for baby chicks). Given our current chicken predation problems, what we really need is some electric poultry fencing to keep predators away. Until we get an adequate set-up like that, we really don't want to bring more baby chicks into our coop. Plus, roosters are rough on hens... you tend to only want one rooster for every 10-20 hens, or the hens start getting beaten up. The first chickens we got came to us in rough shape because the rooster they had been living with (affectionately dubbed "Agent Orange") had defoliated them so badly.
But what do we want, then? Chicken dinner.
By the time Tucker and I got downstairs (still before 7 am), the rooster was headless and plucked and getting ready for a nice ice bath.
Austin got lots of points today for not making me kill the chicken. :)
