7th Ward Roosters, Flightless Angels of Death

"Run, chicken, run. Don't you lose your breath. Chickens don't get no life after death."

The New Orleans Times Picayune was covering a murder and a news story broke out. Apparently, there is a substantial population of feral chickens across several New Orleans wards that has grown post-Katrina. Blown out of their coups during the storm, and then afforded plenty of places to hide and squat amongst some still un-recovered parts of the city, they apparently have thrived.

From the Times Picayune, Michale DeMocker

Here's a short chicken lesson, brought to good residents of New Orleans by the wise musings of one Frank Costanza: 

"You got the hen, the chicken and the rooster. The rooster goes with the chicken. So, who's having sex with the hen?"

"They're all chickens the rooster has sex with all of them."

"That's perverse."

Hens are largely docile creatures. They cluck, but generally don't crow. They lay delicious eggs for omelets and, once captured, they can be fried, smoked, baked, stewed or broiled into delicious bits and pieces. 

Roosters are the tweaked-out redneck boyfriends of the fowl world. They're over-caffeinated 7 year old boys with razors strapped to their wrists, and they will put a blade in you for even the mildest of perceived offenses. If they are captured and cooked, they taste a bit like a well-oiled softball mitt. What they lack in size, taste or intelligence, they make up for in wily, fluttering, kamikaze spastic fury. They take no notice of friends nor foes or hands that feed them versus those that wring their necks (though, historically, these hands have been pretty interchangeable).

Given the opportunity, the uptown coyote may eat your baby. The rooster will cut him just to watch him bleed. 

There's this urbanite perception of the noble cock climbing triumphantly to the top of the hen house, puffing out his brilliant chest and issuing a single proud reveille to start the day, silhouetted by the rising sun. Then, clearing his throat, hopping down and going about his business of makin' the love (and more tasty chickens). 

This is a lie. Roosters are sick sadists who engage in a U.S. Panamanian campaign against the unjust oppressors of their brood. From the earliest cracks of morning light till well into the brunching hour and even then sporadically through the day, they let loose with this psychological warfare. You've never known true pain until you've had a hungover morning begin pre-sunrise with incessant, unstoppable crowing. Every shrieking syllable finds its way into the parched cracks of your abused brain and then explodes and reverberates against the membranes...that should go over well in a place like New Orleans.

Between the coyotes, foxes, feral chickens and wild parrots, New Orleans is turning into the model for the modern urban ecosystem. The greatest menace, without a doubt, the rooster.