Murder In the Coop

When I was a kid in NJ, my mother and I would walk across the street from our garden apartment to the line of stores to shop. One of the stores was a chicken store. The walls were lined with wooden boxes made of dowels. Each box contained several chickens. The smell in the store was strong but pleasant and sweet, like birds. The sounds were muffled clucks and women talking in a low voice. Then, without warning, the owner would drop the side of one of the boxes and grab a chicken by the legs, pull the chicken out, and close the box quickly. The noise increase was instant. Chicken wings flapped, screeching reached a fever pitch and I put my hands over my ears. When I next looked up, the man was giving a bag to the nearest customer. As you can see my understanding of this process was very incomplete. I thought the chickens were soft, pleasant, cuddly birds. I retained these thoughts and memories until we put in a chicken coop last year.

My latest thoughts about chickens are these. Roosters are very loud tough creatures with little regard for anything but getting to the hens and eating. I have been attacked by several roosters and have taken to going to the coop with a three foot long 2 x 2 for self defense. I act kindly to animals but do not like to be attacked by birds with spurs that are three inches long. I find that roosters are so hard, that a 2 x 2 to the side of the head leaves them a little stunned but unharmed. Hens are tough in other ways. They put up with the roosters. When we first put the chickens in the coop, we had too many roosters for the number of hens. This resulted in tired and abused hens and much fighting among the roosters. At sunset, when the chickens would retire to the coop for the evening, loud thumps could be heard from within the coop. Roosters would fight and fling themselves and others into the walls. On more than one occasion, we would find dead chickens in the coop when next we entered to collect eggs. To relieve the rooster pressure within the coop, we gave away 17 birds to a neighbor who wanted to start her own coop. The coop has been much more quiet since giving the birds away and egg production has increased. The balance of five hens per rooster seems to be a winner.