Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...
Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters.
After four meetings, the board didn’t pass an ordinance.... Instead, board members began turning up unannounced on Mr. Leimgruber’s porch. “They said, Billy, what can you do?” he remembers them asking. By then, Nixon’s household was also unraveling. The rooster didn’t cause the couple’s divorce, “but it certainly didn’t help,” Mr. Leimgruber said. [His wife, Carolyn] Stockwell moved out, leaving Nixon behind.
Asked what happened to the rooster, Mr. Leimgruber tried to make a joke: He took the bird to the woodshed, and not figuratively, he said. One evening, he cornered Nixon and used a shotgun to put him down.
“I’ll be honest, I consider myself a guy’s guy,” he said, “but the sound it made will never leave my head.”
I don't like the presidential assassination imagery, especially if it's offered up for cheap laughs.
Anyway... shotgun to kill a rooster? Is that the "guy's guy" method?
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Keep your cock to yourself.
Don’t use a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.
If you used a shotgun to dispatch a rooster, especially inside a woodshed, you'd not hear the bird say a darn thing. I think this calls for the bullshit tag. Or perhaps a special chickenshit one. Unless, for some perverse reason, he used the shotgun to bludgeon the critter....
Planned poultryhood in the woke of multiple incidents of PP. A dark sarcasm.
My mother, a former farm girl, used to wring their necks.
My parents' close-in suburb of Sacramento apparently allows chickens, including roosters (lots of places allow chickens but no roosters), based on what I've heard in the mornings there.
chi com D covid -the gift that keeps on giving.
Well...once, back in college, I had a friend who worked at the Michigan State University poultry farms off campus. We also lived off campus, in a house we rented in East Lansing. One night, the week of Thanksgiving, this guy came by unannounced, flung open the front door, and tossed a live turkey into our living room.
Things you should probably not do in the early 1970s to a room full of stoned young men watching Bennie Hill reruns: Toss a live turkey into the room.
I don't recall all the details, just all of us trying to get our head around the turkey running around the room. Am I seeing this? You seeing it, too? Poor turkey. One moment he's being treated like a king on the farm, the next moment he's...well.
Our friend, the poultry keeper, came in and grabbed him, brought him out to our garage where he stayed for a day. The next day we drew straws to see which of us hearty manly men would be the one to chop its head off so that we could cook him for Thanksgiving.
I'll spare you the gory details. I'll simply say that it was not me, though I was there to witness the gruesome act. My point is that, yes- a shotgun to take out a turkey may seem over the top, but its probably a more sound method than an old dull axe. (we didn't have our axe sharpened because we weren't expecting company).
An epilogue to this story. One of our housemates made it his point to gather and save every last bone from that turkey. From the carcass to remains on our plates. I didn't think much about it because he was a sort of unique genius in his own way. He did his things. Later that week we came back midday from classes and walked into the house and...my God...it smelled of dead bodies. We walked into the kitchen to see our housemate boiling off the bones in batches, to clean them, so that he could put that turkey skeleton back together, a piece at a time.
He had been soaking the bones for a few days in a garbage can filled with...I'm not sure. And today was the day to clean the bones.
None of us knew he was going to do this. In the end, he did it.. He recreated that turkey, every bone of it. Like some high level model car project. The thigh bone's connected to the...
And that's how I spent my college years. Thank you.
Well, at least with a shotgun he's less likely to miss.
Fowl play.
Over a decade ago - I stayed in an traditional B&B in up-country Maui. I was there for work. It was lovely and rustic, and in a neighborhood. There are feral chickens and roosters all over the place. @ 4AM - each day, I had a free wake up call. Howdy.
Shotguns are commonly used for bird hunting. I have one in the gun cabinet for that purpose. I don't see the problem.
During long range patrol trainin we had to kill a chicken and prepare it in the field, with limited tools. The preferred killing method as to hold it by the neck and snap it rapidly, using a circular motion. This dispatched it quickly.
It's not sporting to shoot a bird which is not on the wing.
Chicken Clancycide
"you'd not hear the bird say a darn thing"
I took it to mean the sound of the load at close range spattering the bird.
"Anyway... shotgun to kill a rooster? Is that the "guy's guy" method?"
It's practical. Much more so than some kind of rifle. Shotguns are made to kill birds which are small, agile, fast-moving and hard to hit with a single projectile. Shotgun doesn't necessarily mean a 12 gauge. Maybe it was .410.
It would be difficult to catch a rooster that didn't want to be caught and if you could catch it, it would fight. They have spurs.
Word to the wise:
Guinea Fowl - Noisiest birds you ever heard.
Peacocks - Not consistently noisy, but their cry sounds like some one shouting 'Help!' off in the distance.
File this away for future reference in case you get saddled with a bitch of. neighbor like in the article.
You're welcome.
You shoot birs with a shotgun pellets from distance.
Then you can bring them down and eat the birds...
Ar close range, no.
Bloody mess.
Inga had it right...
A full grown rooster typically has very sharp spurs on his legs that he uses as weapons, plus roosters are generally pretty aggressive. Shotguns are commonly used to put them down, rather than risk injury. You don't generally eat roosters, so you wouldn't be concerned with keeping lead out of the meat.
Unless you are trying to hatch chicks there is no economic reason to keep the rosters around beyond a few months.
That said the story is BS. Discharging a firearm within city limits is usually illegal and rarely safe. If it was in or near a structure,it could badly damage the structure.Additionally, the guy complaining about noise is creating a loud, artificial noise.
Peacocks are the noisiest bird you ever heard, and they're much more obnoxious than guineas.
I think I understand why that councilman is 'former' though.
“We walked into the kitchen to see our housemate boiling off the bones in batches, to clean them, so that he could put that turkey skeleton back together, a piece at a time.
He had been soaking the bones for a few days in a garbage can filled with...I'm not sure. And today was the day to clean the bones.
None of us knew he was going to do this. In the end, he did it.. He recreated that turkey, every bone of it. Like some high level model car project. The thigh bone's connected to the...”
Has anyone made turkey carcass soup after Thanksgiving? Usually smells delicious. Maybe he should’ve just put the bones and carcass in the refrigerator first and then cooked the turkey remains in a big soup pot with onion, garlic, celery, bay leaf, parsley, pepper corns and salt, for 24 hours. When the bone broth is done, strain the broth and make dumplings, delicious.
Also, Merrimack has not been an agricultural community for some time - it is basically a suburb of Nashua and Manchester, and like many such communities is housing, industrial parks and strip malls. Take a look on Google Maps and try to find farmland.
The crack NYT headline writers identify Merrimack, NH as being in Vermont!
Hawaii has feral chickens running everywhere like pigeons in a city, but even more numerous. Some are roosters that crow in the morning, but being a boomer like the rest of you, I'm already awake, so I don't mind it at all. I prefer chickens to pigeons, and not just for the superior meat. Being flightless and more carnivorous, chickens poop on stuff a lot less, and they do a more thorough job of keeping the ground free of food garbage, plus they have that hilarious Southern accent.
“the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons“ would make a great masthead motto. CC, JSM
…better than the Sunday comics. So much fuck up in one little story, beginning with the geography. Given the stupid what’s infected most of New England I have little doubt the events happened as described, perhaps the mist embarrassing episodes omitted..:
…just to note Merrimack is not only not an agricultural town it is technically a college town, though it isn’t the home of Merrimack College, which, of course, is in Massachusetts…
1) Loons, raccoons, and deer aren't waking people up at 5 AM.
2) New arrivals should welcome the early awakening and the end to the death scrolling until 3 AM.
3) I'm naming my chicken "Leimgruber" because he's a jerk/idiot.
Gentrification spares no one, I guess. The only question that matters is whether it's racist!
Back in the early 50's I watched my German grandmother dispatch chickens using a small hatchet in her side yard in small town Wisconsin. Brutal but efficient.
The best part of this article is that the NYT's included
", after the former president,"
because it knows how stupid the people who read the NYT's are.
as several people mentioned above, Hawaii has feral chickens. lots of them. Also has a huge population of feral cats too.and deer and pigs.
Maui Mall has several hundred that cruise the parking lot. Same with Kihei, chickens in the parks, in front of businesses.
And the roosters go off all day, and anytime after 3am. The upside of chickens? they eat centipedes , and Hawaii centipedes are vicious little buggers. Chickens also eat roaches, and other bugs.
discharging a shotgun in a shed?? got to be nonsense. unless you like to see assorted tools, junk boxes etc flying back at you. even a .410 would make a mess of the walls etc.
It's really too bad Spiro Agnew never became president.
It isn't "roosters"- it is "non-egg laying chickens".
"don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”..."
Yeah, those noisy deer…
Ridiculous.
You put his head through an upside down funnel and slit his throat.
"It's really too bad Spiro Agnew never became president."
They had to get rid of him, for less that Biden was guilty of, because they wanted to place their guy, Gerald Ford, who covered up the JFK assassination with the Warren Commission, in power.
The rule in politics is that if you are not guilty of something, they won't let you in the club, because then you are not controllable.
Then Ford pardoned Nixon because his rights as a defendant would have uncovered the plot by the deep state against him.
Nixon was our last true president as the founders intended. Maybe Reagan too.
When I lived in Central America, in a largely gringo enclave, one of those fools got some chickens, including a rooster. He was recalcitrant to the multiple objections voiced to him. It was horrible noise in the early morning and no one quite knew what to do about it. I mentioned this problem to a native guy who was a friend of mine and he said matter-of-factly, "Get a fox."
I get snorted at by the deer in my yard…
"I get snorted at by the deer in my yard…"
Me too, but they're not waking me up at 3am.
"Get a fox."
How does one do that?
Ask around, I guess. Trust me, down there, it wouldn't have been difficult. The hard part would have been convincing the fox that the neighbor's chickens were the easiest prey.
Actually, the deer in my yard don't snort at me; they walk right up and say"hi". But I get snorted at all the time when I'm out with the telescope.
tcrosse said...
It's not sporting to shoot a bird which is not on the wing.
As a turkey hunter, I will tell you that you shoot them on the ground 100% of the time..
There’s no more gentrified city than San Francisco, where rosters are perfectly legal. In my experience, ‘crack
of dawn’ means sixty to ninety minutes before the sun actually rises.
Also, roosters have a spur on the back of its legs, like a boar has a tusk. They can do some serious damage to you along with their sharp beak. Dispatching one with a shotgun is the preferred method.
For some weird reason, we always had chickens and roosters roaming free around Independence Hall at Knott's Berry Farm. I suspect that the Knotts started that when they started the Chicken Dinner Restaurant back in the 1930s. It always hit me as a weird sight to see the chickens and roosters just doing their thing out in front of the theme park. (Right in the middle of Buena Park, CA.)
One thing to watch out abut raising chickens for eggs: My sister got some backyard chickens for eggs and ended up getting really attached to them. So now she can't eat chicken anymore.
"Anyway... shotgun to kill a rooster? Is that the "guy's guy" method?"
Well, it's really hard to find a vein under all those feathers.
Who knows what, if anything, was in the shed. Many old farm sheds have dirt floors which is where the rooster probably was.
A lot of New England towns still have small scale agriculture and in most it’s legal to discharge a firearm on your own land.
Towns in New England have borders with other towns but they don’t have town limits like you see in other states around the town centers. All the farm land up to the next town was included in the town. Think township.
Hmmmm. Growing up (long ago and far from Virginia) I was taught that you don’t keep roosters if you’re selling eggs because fertilized eggs have blood inside and are inedible. Now Google assures that something else causes blood eggs and fertilized eggs are perfectly edible if they have not been incubated. So an old wives tale (except I’m an old husband).
BTW, there’s a scene in “Cold Mountain” where Renee Zellweger turns a rooster that has been terrorizing Nicole Kidman into meat for the dinner table. The neck-wringing is done off camera, but the sound effects are glorious.
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
For all of that my sympathy lies with the rooster owner. Noise cancelling headphones are not that expensive and one can sleep wearing them. “Rubber bullet” ear plugs are one short step up from free and do a good job.of shutting out unwanted noise.
There's a flock (is the the right word?) of turkeys that shows up regularly in my neighborhood- maybe 20-30 birds. I'm not exactly out in the country, I have no idea where they roost.
We have a fourteen-year-old Barred Rock hen who, like us, divides her time between town and country.
Also, when compared to LBJ, Carter, Obama, and Biden, Dick Nixon comes across as a very capable President and not nearly as big as jerk as any of those four.
"There's a flock (is the the right word?) of turkeys that shows up regularly in my neighborhood- maybe 20-30 birds."
We have two flocks that are grazing through our yard daily. I think they're after all the acorns. One is an adult (I assume Mom) with 7 or 8 youngsters. Mom always has her head up. One of the youngsters has a seriously damaged leg. Poor thing; I don't have much hope for it. See them 3 or 4 times a day. As with the deer, eagles, ducks, and muskrats they are very tolerant of our presence.
I was going to say none of them wake me up in the morning, but that wasn't true until lately; the juvenile eagles are annoyingly noisy.
They won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.
In the country our flock of 30 itinerant turkeys is often attended by several peacocks remarkably compatible in size and temperament.
>Big Mike said...
For all of that my sympathy lies with the rooster owner. Noise cancelling headphones are not that expensive and one can sleep wearing them.<
I beg you, tell me you are shitting us.
rooster crows loudly and assertively, while a capon is generally silent or produces weak, infrequent, or atypical vocalizations due to a lack of testosterone.!!!
For humanely dispatching fowl gravely injured by predators, I’ve suspended it upside down just above an open contractor bag and instantly cut off its head with garden loppers. A shotgun just makes a mess.
Found that scene
https://youtu.be/QqZ9bCZczDA?is=KznYkuPD3hFLglGj
Shotguns make anything sound more rustic and folkloric. Maybe for Leimgruber or the reporter a "shotgun" is any gun you shoot ...
"R C Belaire said...
Back in the early 50's I watched my German grandmother dispatch chickens using a small hatchet in her side yard in small town Wisconsin. Brutal but efficient."
My parents raised chickens to sell the eggs. They alternated years for butchering the old ones. (200 in one hen house, 100 in the other.) It was a fun time of year - my dad would set the chicken's neck on a wood stump and whack the neck with a hatchet. Then he'd throw it in an empty barrel because the body would thrash around. Fun to watch. Sometimes he'd miss the barrel and then it was really fun to watch. Any roosters (as a chick) that accidentally came with the other chicks were the first to go.
"tcrosse said...
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
They do. Especially with a farm dog chasing them. Maybe not very far, but they're in the air. Besides, I've never seen one climb up a tree to roost. ;-)
Wild turkeys certainly fly, though I don't know how they'd do dropped from a plane. Would they have the stamina to get down?
Can farm-raised turkeys fly?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
Hey, this is actually a pop culture reference to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkeys_Away
When my mother got tired of her chicken coop, we had an usual number of chicken dinners. Being a small kid and stupid (still am) i believed the story about them "running away". LOL.
IRC, we had next door neighbor who just wrung their necks. No, pity from this human female. Truely, "deadlier then the male". Of course killing roosters might be more difficult.
We have tons of wild turkeys around here, and their first instinct is to run. You really have to scare them to make them fly. It must be a big effort for them.
Been watching videos of "Barney the Cuckatoo" and its the same thing. This guy doesn't wasnt to fly anywhere. Climbing and walking is his thing.
"Hey, this is actually a pop culture reference"
Well, yeah…
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