Lessons From Roosters

Here’s what I learned from living with one of earth’s most hated animals.

Illustrations by the author.

Editor’s Note: This Medium Writers Challenge entry was added to Human Parts on October 20, 2021.

Few creatures are as maligned as the rooster. I suppose there are cockroaches, mosquitoes, sewer rats, and aphids — but I can’t come up with any birds that are quite so hated (even pigeons have a fierce and loving following), and I certainly can’t come up with an animal who is hated with such dependency on gender.

My rooster’s name was Foot. I thought this was a funny word and I liked the way it sounded coming out of my mouth. But also, when Foot was young — maybe six days old or so — he nearly died, and it had to do with his feet. Or, it might be more accurate to say that his feet refused to come all the way back to life, insisting that it not be forgotten that this little rooster had walked right up to death and turned back around again, against the odds. Baby chicks are fragile, and sometimes they die. The fact that this one had survived instead felt like a kind of a miracle, and I liked the idea that I would remember that any time I said his name.

When I named him Foot, I thought he was a she. If you are going to be the kind of person who believes they can raise chickens in a city backyard — an urban homesteader or a cottage-core romantic — you are going to want hens. Most people agree that hens are great. They’re quiet enough; they make eggs; they’re fairly easy to manage; and if you don’t end up liking them, they taste good. Their male counterparts, on the other hand, are loud and unpredictable; they’ll fight to the death (and will attack a grown man); they copulate violently; and if you decide to eat them, you’ll find that their meat is tough and unpalatable. Hens seem to be designed specifically for humans; roosters for a human-less wild.

Like most people, I wanted hens. I went to The Feed Shop on the south side of Chicago with the knowledge that they had cheap baby chicks in the spring —although I’d heard from friends that the people who worked there weren’t all that good at sexing them. But…