the goddamn marauding rooster

Every chicken owner will tell you that if you post anything about a problematic bird, you must be prepared to pop open your umbrella and endure a deluge of HAR HAR KILL IT AND EAT IT jokes. It is the "shave and a haircut" of animal discussions, people can't not finish the thought. And that's ok. But also, stop it.

Recently, a rogue rooster went traveling in search of his spirit and decided that the flow of the universe was leading him to the place he was truly meant to be - parked in front of our chicken coop. Our girls are normally free-range, and spend their afternoons napping in the lychee tree, but nobody has explained the tea metaphor to this guy, so we've had to lock them up while we chase this asshole around in circles. We have shooed him, sprayed him with a hose, rigged stick-in-a-box traps, ambushed him with towels and sheets and blankets. The humane society wants a $200 deposit to borrow a chicken trap, and oh yeah, they don't have any anyway. The man actually bagged the rooster, using one of my good quilts, and drove him around town in circles before chucking him over the fence into the gulch by the botanical gardens, a quarter of a mile away. He ran straight back, covered in mud and lured by the seductive honking of Sirius the Lovelorn Hen. She is pretty sure he can change, that she can tame his wild love, and that we just don't understand her LIFE. She is wrong. Sorry, Sirius.

This has been going on for two weeks now. We have had to explain to all the neighbors that it is NOT our goddamn rooster, and that they are free to trap and remove him, too, when he's crapping in their yards. Twitter wants me to eat him. Leave aside the fact that I have never killed an animal in my life and I would cry my damn face off trying to rip his little guts out on my front lawn - the whole problem is that I CAN'T CATCH THE ROOSTER. His drumsticks run faster than mine, and he can fucking FLY. If I had to survive on a homestead, I would have a neat little garden and fat farm animals that would be easy to murder, not wild lusty gulch roosters.

I told the boys to apply all their robotics ingenuity to solving this problem, and they became very involved with watching roomba gifs.

I am getting ready to hand over all our Most Dangerous Game credentials and feed myself to a lion; we are clearly unfit to survive in the wild.