Rooster not-kill day

    Well, we wimped out. But here’s how we got ready for the nearly-kill, and what ended up happening!

  The day before, the roosters were in what the kids christened ‘The Dome of Death’. It’s basically a starvation chamber, so they were nice and empty of food and other ickyness. They’d been put in it a few days previously (with food), as there were some particularly nasty gang-rape incidents happening. This channelled that energy into cock fighting instead.

  That night, they went back into their crates under the house. They only had to deal with these for two nights, when their crowing suddenly hit grown-rooster status. At 3am. Seven roosters crowing at once in the deathly-quiet suburbs is scary when it’s your fault. Note the onion bag on the left-that one just would not stop. He went in a crate, then a flowerpot, then finally we stuffed him headfirst in the bag. That shut him up.

  Mr Red-Vest, not looking happy even though he has more space than the average battery hen

  Then they went back into the Dome of Death that morning, and we waited for our instructor to turn up. By this stage I think i’d already wimped out, and had sort of decided that maybe i’d just give the husband moral support and observe. Reading a Buddhism book over the previous few days didn’t really help-i’ll have to stick with the farming books next time. Then our instructor turned up, and instead of her being the bossy, can-do, shut-up-and-toughen-up person we’d been hoping for, she was really quiet and unsure! Turns out she hadn’t done much of the actual chop-chop part herself, and wasn’t particularly keen to. We had pictured someone waltzing in, pinning and dispatching a rooster in an efficient manner, then sweeping us along before we had a chance to think about it. As it was none of the four adults present wanted to do it! The husband and I were having horror thoughts about botching it and causing needless suffering with our ineptness. So we pulled out, fed them, then I rang around and found someone to take them all before we went through another noisy night, and we *might* reschedule another day with someone else. Probably Tamara, as she would laugh at us mercilessly and tell us to toughen up. Which is just what a difficult task needs.