Memorial Day Moves
On Memorial Day weekend 30 years ago, I moved out of my mother’s home and into my first apartment, the lease for which I had signed illegally, being only 17. Since it was 1979 and I was 17, you can probably guess why my memories of that weekend, while colorful, are blurry. My roommate and I lived right around the corner from the gay discotheque, The Pink Hippopotamus. Enough said, yes?
On Memorial Day 2001, 24 multicolored roosters flew into the Eastern Shore Sanctuary from the informal sanctuary where they had been living in the trees, occasionally taking shelter in an open barn. The retired animal control officer who had taken them in over the course of years had lost the lease to the land and was moving to Florida. The birds came from cockfighting busts, cruelty cases, and one “4H experiment gone horribly wrong.”
Nobody else would take them. Back then, many farmed animal sanctuaries strictly limited the number of roosters they accepted and none would take former fighting roosters. Some operated under the (false) assumption that roosters cannot live together in harmony and would accept only one rooster at a time no matter how many hens were there to balance the gender scales.
Since we took in escaped “broiler” chickens from local poultry operations, accepting any bird who found his or her way to us, regardless of sex, we’d already learned that roosters can and do flock together sociably, as of course their wild relatives must. Still… 24 roosters?!? All at the same time?!? Their rescuer assured us that they’d been living together peacefully for years. If we didn’t take them, they’d have to be euthanized. She cried. We said yes.
They arrived in a rattle-trap collection of cages crowded into a battered pick-up truck. I’ll never forget the reaction of the hens — red and white egg factory refugees who had never seen a rooster other than the big white “broiler” roosters at the sanctuary — as we let the roosters out into the yards in turn, each seeming more colorful than the last. Red roosters with black markings, yellow roosters with brown markings, black roosters with iridescent green tail feathers. Striped roosters! Spotted roosters! Tropically multicolored roosters! One group of red hens stood in a row along a fence, their beaks literally gaping open in surprise.
And everybody got along fabulously. Here’s a shot of some of them sleeping in the trees:
So, when the real challenge came, we were ready. Later that summer, we got a call about roosters who had been confiscated during a cockfighting bust. They were very aggressive, flying at each other and even at hens, and were thus being held separately. Could we offer even a few of them sanctuary? The young woman on the telephone was desperate. Couldn’t we at least try? We thought about what we had learned so far; I thought about what I knew about ethology, bird psychology, and trauma and recovery. We came up with a tentative rehabilitation program. Since our back-up plan was to give each bird his own little coop and yard if the rehab effort didn’t work, we couldn’t take many. Just three. It was a start.
It worked. (Read all about it here.) Since then, we’ve rehabbed many former fighters and convinced other sanctuaries to be more generous in offering homes to roosters. Now, more and more local authorities seek to place confiscated roosters in sanctuaries rather than killing them automatically. (See the story — including video — of the latest former fighters to come to the sanctuary here.)
Be careful what you wish for. Now we’re in the sticky situation where local authorities want to rescue roosters, but sanctuaries have no room for them. And so, in part to be able to rescue more roosters (but also to free me from the unhealthy rural isolation in which I’ve been living alone for the past couple of years), sanctuary cofounder Miriam Jones will be taking over and relocating the sanctuary side of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary & Education to a larger property. (Get the 411 on the move here.)
Me, I’ll be helping the birds to move and get settled into their new location. (The move is in mid-June and I will stay with them at the new place through July.) Then I’ll be moving on to Minneapolis, the virtues of which I’ve been singing here for some time. I’ll continue to work on the “Education Center” side of the organization and to visit the sanctuary frequently.
If you support the sanctuary, our important work with roosters, and/or our longstanding commitment to social and environmental justice along with animal liberation, please consider making a donation at this time. Moving is expensive and will be a lot less stressful for all of us if we don’t have to be quite so worried about money.
And, please do visit the new and improved sanctuary website. We’ve still got some “projects” and “connections” pages to add, but it’s mostly built and it’s going to take you a long time to work through all of the new content that’s already up.
