When a hen is, in fact, most probably a cockerel

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

For weeks now, there’s been a question mark above the head of one of our Cuckoo Marans, as to whether it’s a hen or a cockerel. When young, it’s hard to tell. I’ve been praying this bird didn’t turn out to be a he, because I’ve grown very attached to the magnificent specimen. But with each passing day, the doubt slips away. The bird is bigger than the other one, it has an upright tail wth subtle splashes of metallic blue as well as the expected black and white stripes. It even stands differently, the female walking round with her body kind of oval and horizontal to the ground while the suspect male carries himself with pride and vertically.

I spoke to the breeder, who said she’d exchange him—but that’s all well and good. Dietrich, as we named her before she was a him, is a lovely bird with a great personality. A pet, not livestock to be bartered or exchanged, and certainly never to be eaten. But when he goes back, I’ve no idea what will happen to him. He may live out his life with a flock of his own ladies, or he may end up on someone’s dinner table. As a vegetarian I’m having real issues with that possibility, and it makes the prospect of exchanging him even more fraught with emotion. To say I am unhappy with the dilemma is an understatement.

Don’t get me wrong. I recognise the blindingly obvious, that most chickens end up being eaten. I’ve even said, should we get some broody birds next year and some eggs from eBay, that I’d be happy to give the cockerels to my friend Jo to raise for the table. But that’s because they wouldn’t be pets, Dietrich is a pet, and what’s more those possible cockerels of the future would be cared for until their despatch, which would be done humanely and conscientiously. I’m not saying that prospect is easy to accommodate, but while I say ‘meat is murder’ for my own self to ever contemplate—and the phrase is one my personal ethical bedrocks of belief—that doesn’t extend to lecturing that eating meat is fundamentally wrong for everyone under all circumstances.

No, what is most definitely wrong is cruelty, intensive farming, animals pumped full of chemicals and kept in little boxes and pens, forced to live wholly unnatural, bleak lives. If you can raise and kill an animal for food, good for you; if you know you can’t and never could, if you must have someone else do it for you, if you see fluffy animals as sweet but pretend the lamb with mint sauce wasn’t fluffy and sweet before it was killed, then I do believe you should forsake meat and give your conscience a break from all that concealed guilt and overt hypocrisy you carry.

In a perfect world free of people who are phobic of nature, the countryside, and, in particular, crowing cockerels, I’d keep Dietrich. But I have to be realistic, and I don’t do that kind of realism very well. I know I don’t want to be eating fertilised eggs, although they look and taste the same as unfertilised eggs, I’m told. I also don’t want to be continually dealing with broody hens hatching lots of chicks. We’d have no idea, if Dietrich fathered chicks by the ex-bats, the Buff Orpingtons, or the Lavender Araucanas, what the babies would end up looking like. And as we wouldn’t want to keep them all, the chances people would want to buy weird hybrids are practically zero. You mostly get either purebreeds, or carefully bred hybrids. Who knows what nature would produce in terms of looks, character, levels of egg production?

And then there are neighbours, and local councils, who while turning a blind eye to people needing help on the street, or willing to accept loud music late at night, often fail to appreciate feathered alarm clocks going off at the crack of dawn. Hell, our next-door neighbour doesn’t ‘like’ bees. Bees, for fuck’s sake. She accepts that we have them, but I don’t for one minute think the bees aren’t fuelling a whispered bitch-fest every time she sees us when out with her chums in the town. She likes the hens, but hens are very different from cockerels.

So far, Dietrich hasn’t crowed. Not a single cock-a-doodle-doo. I’ve only witnessed one attempt by the bird to ‘tread’ (the poultry term for you-know-what), and that was with the other Cuckoo Marans. She was alarmed to find her companion jumping on her back and biting the back of her neck, throwing him off within seconds, and that was that. Apparently hens display this kind of behaviour sometimes, but it’s rare.

This morning I watched our flock closely when I put down their food. Dietrich gets pecked by the adults same as all the other youngsters, and shows no sign of aggression towards any of the other birds. But today he rushed at me through the fencing, only briefly, but clearly to warn me away. It doesn’t mean he’s going to get permanently nasty. He might, though. Cockerels can be so aggressive they attack humans on sight. I can’t say for certain he wouldn’t attack me, because that’s down to biology, not upbringing. And the fact remains, it is unfeasible to keep him for our own reasons and all those referenced above.

I am sad, because while I am aware it’s all too easy to project our own emotions onto animals, I have noticed how close he is to the other Cuckoo Marans (not plural, singular but always with an s at the end). They are inseparable. I’ve watched for weeks now as they preen each other, rest their heads on each other’s backs, and play together. To say they love each other would be to over-reach, to perceive something we can’t know is there or not; but they are certainly very fond of each other. She’s the only bird he’s tried it on with so far. And now I’m the swine who’s going to pull them apart, with the cockerel ending up I know not where once he’s back with the breeder. Hopefully many of you will understand why I prevaricate, why I have so far failed to take action.

This situation sucks. It is very painful for me. There’s no rush to take Dietrich back to the breeder, she said he could be returned in one, two, three months from now. There’s been no anti-social crowing as yet, and, 99.99 per cent of the time, the bird is peaceable, loveable, and very sweet. If he weren’t, I wouldn’t be so attached. Apparently there should have been some serious noise coming from him by now, which is why there’s been the big question mark over sexing him. Even this very minute, as I type this, a part of me still hopes that there’s a chance the bird just turns out to be a rather butch hen. I know, I know. Highly unlikely.

I know what needs to be done but I don’t know what to do. How’s that for a nonsensical sentence? In the US some vets remove cockerels’ voice boxes. That, like the US allowing cats to be de-clawed, is a barbaric, reprehensible practice, and, like cat de-clawing, is banned across the EU. Not that I’d consider it if it was legal. You can probably find a vet who’d neuter a cockerel. I don’t know if it’s possible but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, assuming the skilled knowledge to do the op is available. It’s not in itself an absurd notion—we do it to cats, dogs, some other animals too—but neutering a cockerel wouldn’t stop its nature-given tendency to greet the morning, to sound the alarm. At least, I don’t think it would. It depends, I suppose, on whether the drop in hormone production following neutering would be matched by a decline in that behaviour. Were it not for the fear that a bird I’ve cared for might end up as somebody’s dinner, I wouldn’t be wringing my hands so much about taking Dietrich back.

There might be another way to approach this, though. What if I can find someone who’s willing to give Dietrich a home in the countryside, to live out his life? His little life only cost me £10, so I’d happily give him away for free on proviso I got a guarantee he wasn’t going to be, as some so horribly put it, necked for the table. I do know a breeder of Cuckoo Marans, local to me—unlike the breeder he was purchased from—and so I’m thinking it’s worth calling her to ask if she might take him. I’ve bought two birds from her so far, with two more being kept aside for me until they’re big enough to come live in our garden, they’re tiny babies right now. She’s already generously offered my beloved the opportunity in future to keep bee hives on her land, for free, as many as he likes so long as, obviously enough, he maintains them. So she’s a kind lady, and certainly loves her many birds—chickens, geese, ducks. She and her husband keep hundreds, and have a substantial amount of land. So maybe there’s a chance. I’ll let you know.

See, I’d already decided quite some time ago that I never wanted to go near the breeder I got our Cuckoo Marans and Buff Orpingtons from ever again. Her farm was chaotic, the different breeds mixing all the time, tiny bantam cockerels leaping onto massive Orpington hens, and so on. It screamed bad practice, poor discipline. And way too many cockerels. Plus, so many of the hens had raw and bleeding backs from being ‘trod’ way too many times. The prospect of returning Dietrich to that woman—who I think was unknowingly cruel and even then, not in a way most animal charities would recognise—fills me with dread; the idea of my cockerel ending up with the other lady, with whom I have become friendly, doesn’t give me the chills at all.

Hell, I’ll ask. Asking costs nothing, after all. But if all else fails, if my breeder friend says she can’t or won’t for any reason, as is her right of course, and if I can’t find any other alternative I can’t think of right now, Dietrich is going to have to go back to the other breeder. And I will forever wonder what became of that proud and exceptionally beautiful bird. His beauty and confidence bears testimony, I know, to how well I look after our birds—and despite the sadness, I am myself proud of how they’re all coming along so well. The ex-bats, I sometimes think, know how lucky they are. The others don’t, but they’re happy nonetheless.

Keeping chickens is certainly an adventure that it is hard to convey the wonder of. But I’ve learned so much in the past six months, and continue to do so.

categories: animals