I've heard that if one has a chicken coop, the hens will play nicer with each other and lay more regular eggs if a rooster is kept in an adjacent coop. mudpuppie can probably speak more authoritatively on this :)

omg DOG. Our backyard-neighbor has got a new dog who's in heat, or just lonely. She croons mournfully every night. It's heartbreaking and annoying at the same time.

cock on the run
ya crow and everybody comes a runnin'
take a flying cluck
and hide away
(c-cocky, cock on the run...)

Freeeeeeeeeeedom!

hmmm. all the people in town here that have hens don't have a rooster around, but I've heard that too muddgirl.

I do not understand for the life of me why anyone would put up with their own dog barking more than an occasional hello when someone stops by, or if they're playing. We train ours to STFU, but different strokes I guess. I also don't understand the point of getting a dog if he can't come inside.

I do not understand for the life of me why anyone would put up with their own dog barking

Me neither. Isn't it more annoying to him than it is to me??

I also don't understand the point of getting a dog if he can't come inside.

In my neighborhood, it seems pretty common to leave bigger dogs outside if the owners work during the day, and let them back in overnight. I don't like the practice at all - the dogs get lonely and frustrated and hot and sometimes escape.

What, no snark about the other meaning of the word cock?

Me, too, chewie! Our dog was adopted before we got her, and these people kept her outside - with chickens, actually (this was outside the city). After two weeks of crushing boredom and lack of interaction, she killed a chicken... and they brought her back to the rescue organization. I'm like, what?!? You got this dog to keep her outside? WTF? She's so not a guard dog, if that's what they were thinking... The only way she could protect a place is if the burglar gets so involved in petting her and playing with her he forgets to rob the house. This is a dog who is always beside you, follows you from room to room, and even relocates herself if you move a few feet away; she must have been in abject misery being kept outside 24/7, poor baby.

She's in lovedoggy nirvana, now, as far as that goes. We definitely wanted a companion dog, and she's definitely that dog.

Well! Suddenly - silence. For the last 15 or 20 minutes, anyway. Dunno what happened, or what that was all about at all. Another one of those neighborhood unsolved-mysteries, I guess.

It's so quiet, I have the persistent feeling that somebody is cooking coq au vin somewhere nearby.

Or, wait... a more optimistic (from the cock's point of view) thought is that it's getting on into twilight a bit now, and no sun, no crow. We'll see.

Yeah taz, pooches are social - ours are almost always at least in the same room with us. The cat,too. Your pooch sounds like she turned out to be a real sweetie.

Maybe it was an alarm clock, with someone hitting Snooze? Ikkyu has a hideously annoying alarm clock that sounds like a rooster.

No, this was really-really rilly loud - not just a few-houses-around loud, plus variations in the sound and timing, etc. - it had to be the real article.

But, Farmboy Ikkyu! aw.

Just a thought.

Also: hee. Cock.

In most of the cities around here (that I know of, anyway) roosters are prohibited, though you are allowed between 3 and 5 hens, depending on the city.

Oh, I sooo want to have chickens some day. Well, hens - not those loud-mouth roosters.

taz - I suggest a viewing of Chicken Run for entertainment if the alarm-cock is an every day thing.

I don't understand why anyone would have a rooster around here.

It quite possibly wasn't on purpose. When you buy chicks, they're sexed with something like only 98% certainty, meaning there's a 2% chance that you end up with a boy. Chickens don't begin to lay until they're 4 or 5 months old, and they often don't start to show their secondary sex characteristics (wattles, spurs on roosters) until after that, so it's quite possible to think you're raising hens and then get a surprise.

That happened on the next street over from me this summer. Little guy crowed and crowed for about three weeks, but hasn't been heard from since. I'm hoping he ended up on a nice farm somewhere.

For trivia purposes, should you ever be in the market, you should know that you can also buy Sex Link chickens. That's the name of a breed, not some kinky descriptor. They've been bred so that females are one color and males are another. So Black Sex Link chicks, if they're black, are girls.

As for keeping the rooster nearby -- I've heard that too, but I don't know how much useful truth there is to it. If there's a rooster in a large flock, he's pretty much always going to be the, uh, cock of the walk. Chickens have a pretty firm pecking order, you know, so he's going to do what he can to keep things in line. This means feeding and nurturing his favorite hens, as well as beating up on the weak ones he doesn't like. So it may be beneficial to some hens' production, but I don't think you can say it's true across the board.

I can say, though, that they'll lay happily and with dedication even if there ain't no man around. So why bother, really?

And that's all I have to say about chickens.

But, Farmboy Ikkyu! aw.

Heh. He uses it only to annoy me on occasion, not as a daily alarm clock.

Because then I might have to kill him. Damned thing is *loud*.

Heh, occhiblu. When I was 12, my step-mum bought me an alarm clock that would turn off if you yelled at it. I don't think she knew that I could swear so extensively (or loudly). (Yes, even then I was a truckermouthed non-morning person.)

I admit I clicked on this in my RSS feed because it said COCK.

What, nothing about COCK? Oh, BALLS.

And to me the coq au vin theory is the hopeful one.

BALLS!

"Balls, balls balls."

ya may wanna apply a little ctrl-f / splatkey-f there...but the whole damn article's definitely worth reading

So many replies to the post title in my head have left me unable to choose any at all, you minx, you.