To Kill Or Not To Kill ?

[csgray]

There are a lot of feral chickens in Puna. They escape or are left behind by moving neighbors and go feral all the time. That is how we ended up with a feral flock on our street. One guy moved back to the mainland and turned his hens loose, then when the cock farmer finally moved out of his rental he left a rooster. The rooster and broody hens did what chickens do and then we had multiple feral roosters who spent the entire night crowing back and forth at random intervals. I get up at 5 every morning to go to work, and they were causing me to only get 5 or fewer hours of sleep every night, which is not healthy. I am enough of an insomniac on my own, I don't need help form roosters.

We eventually trapped all the roosters and took them to the humane society, and made the mistake of leaving the hens. The drive to reproduce was strong, so one of the hens went down to the other end of our street and proudly lead a rooster home for the flock. This guy managed to sire a multitude of chicks; if the feral cats weren't getting them we would be headed back to the multiple roosters scenario. We will be trapping the entire flock and taking them to the humane society as a permanent solution to the problem. Putting up with what Kalakoa constantly refers to as "accepted Ag. uses" is one thing, but no one has to put up with feral roosters trespassing onto their property and causing sleepless nights. Maybe some of you can just ignore it, but everyone has different tolerances for noise pollution, and different sleep needs, and for some of us a rooster crowing outside our bedroom is too hard to just ignore. Sleep is essential to health and people have the right to sleep undisturbed by noise coming from their own property.

Carol