Louis/Louie the House Rooster

Last Saturday Jen and I buried our house rooster, Louis, or Louie on odd days. House rooster?? Yes.

It all started 10 years ago when Jen moved out here and she and Leigh Hansen raised 25 baby chicks from the Murray McMurray Hatchery. They send you the “Exotic Laying Mix” and you get all sorts of beautiful chickens. With each batch they send one free rooster. In that batch we got a fluffy black rooster of the “cochin” breed. That particular rooster not only got to be huge, but also he had feathers all the way down his legs and on the feet. The children named him “Bigfoot,” or alternately “Lance the Pants.” Bigfoot was the ideal rooster for the Land School. He was large and dramatic. He was also a good protector of the flock – sounding the alarm when danger came in the form of a fox, a dog or a hawk. Finally, and most importantly, Bigfoot was gentle and never attacked a child. This can be a problem with roosters, but the big cochin breeds, like big dogs, are generally known for less aggression.

                                                  

For many years Bigfoot presided over the flock, but as he aged, other roosters came and took his place.  Eventually he died. Three years ago we decided to get some fresh blood in the coop and we ordered another 25 baby chicks. This time we knew we wanted a cochin rooster again, so we paid extra for a partridge cochin. The partridge cochin has a beautiful mix of colors, including red, green, and black. As our baby chicks grew, we discovered that they had actually sent us two cochins and a polka dot rooster. The weeks passed and the day came for the baby chicks to experience the outside world. We opened up the auxiliary coop doors and they all came running out. It was a beautiful sunny summer day, and we had three junior high students there, delighting in the baby chicks frolicking in the green chicken yard. It was a harvest day and we went to the garden to bring in the goodies. At lunch we checked on the chickens. Fine. Then I left to go to the Twin Cities with the vegetables and while I was gone a surprise summer thunderstorm blew in. When Jen went out after the storm, she checked on the baby chicks. Most of them had made it inside, but both cochin rooster chicks were outside and completely soaked. An adult chicken has feathers that shed the rain and brains enough to go inside, but these fluffy chicks were new to the whole outside thing and without the mature feathers. By the time Jen found them, they were nodding off and shivering and closing their eyes – all bad signs for chickens. She called the Junior Highers over and they went into full chicken resuscitation mode. The chickens were brought into the house and cuddled under the shirts of the young people. They were blown dry with hair dryers. They were hand fed and allowed to warm up under a heat lamp. Both cochins made a full recovery, and the Junior Highers named them Louis and Louie, after one of their saviors, Louie Umbarger.

Louis and Louie grew to be magnificent roosters. They strutted and crowed and fought with each other and the other roosters, but never chased people. Then one day, Nadine (who worked here at that time) came over to visit the chickens with her toddler, Rena. When Rena’s back was turned, either Louis or Louie came running up like he was going to attack her. Nadine swooped in and picked Rena up and gave the rooster a stern talking to. Well, needless to say that was not the last time Rena was threatened by one of the roosters. Our hypothesis was that large people were different enough not to trigger the aggressive response, but a toddling child was just small enough to set off the alarm bells in the rooster’s brain, about chicken size. By the time it happened a third time, Rena decided she did not want to come over to the Farmstead and we had decided that we only really needed one cochin rooster. The problem was which one was the aggressive one? As Thanksgiving approached, some friends of ours were going to butcher a bunch of turkeys and we had the opportunity to add a rooster into the disassembly line. But which one? They looked identical. So one night I grabbed one off the perch and tied a twist tie around his leg. Then we brought Rena over the next day to see which one showed aggression to her (of course we were right there with her to protect her!). The first time, we saw no aggression from either chicken. Grrr. Then the next day was judgment day because the following day was butcher day. So we brought Rena over for one more try and one of them was slightly more interested – Mr. Twist Tie. We took a chance and brought him in to be butchered and left the remaining rooster with the flock.

Since we hadn’t been able to tell them apart, our remaining rooster might have been Louis or Louie, so we just left him with both names. We either chose correctly, or he got the message, because from that day forward we had no problems with aggression towards Rena or any other person. In fact he was competing for the Best Rooster Ever award. We would go to the county fair and see the chickens, and we would know that Louis could win every award if we were to enter him. He was big, proud and beautiful. He was attentive with the hens, showing them where the food was and then standing guard while they ate. He sired a clutch of baby chicks with a secretive mama hen. Everyone loved him. But he did have one enemy. There was one other mature rooster left in the coop, the polka-dot skinny boy named Mr. Sir. Mr. Sir showed no aggression to Louis until the winter came and they were confined to close quarters. Then there were occasional fights and we would sometimes see Mr. Sir a little worse for the wear. They had to work out who was the big boss of the chicken coop. We thought for sure it was Louis.

Then last January, Jen and I went on vacation, and our friend Karen cared for the animals. On the day we got back Karen had noticed some blood on one of the roosts and told us so in a note. When I checked, I found Louis hiding head first in a hen’s nest box. This was odd, because he was usually the winner of the rooster fights. Not this time! We brought him back into the house and gave him some food and water. The next day we checked and within all tangle of the feathers on his legs there were wounds on each of his legs right where his knee joint was. Note: on a chicken, the knee joint is “backwards” and the hollow side is facing forward. On his right leg, that hollow was slashed and the skin had parted and the wound was scabby and full of puss. OUCH! We clipped the feathers and cleaned it up, but the wound was more than Jen and I could handle. So we brought Louie into the vet. Now, going to the vet with a chicken is not standard protocol in the country. But Louis was a special chicken and we have seen many chickens recover from terrible wounds before, so we decided to pay for it out of our own pockets. The vet cleaned it up better than we could, and he prescribed an antibiotic and an antiseptic cleaning wash. Louie stayed in our house to recover. Well… long story short, many times Louie would seemingly make a recovery, but because the wound was right at the joint, it wouldn’t heal over and would get worse again. It stayed open, so we kept cleaning it out and eventually let him walk around the house while he recovered. We tried poultices, garlic, different antibiotics. He actually seemed better. He would crow in the morning and follow us around the house. He liked noodles and cucumbers. He would sit with us when we watched TV. It is actually not too bad having a chicken in the house. We put down newspaper and picked up after him every day, sometimes twice a day. We had paper towels and natural cleaning products handy in all rooms. We gave him outside time and he could actually run (with a pronounced limp) and he was hard to catch to bring him back inside. He was sure to make a recovery. But he did not. As September came around, he became more and more lethargic. His comb and wattle went from bright red to a pinkish color. He no longer wandered the house, preferring to sit in the corner of the front porch. Before the snows came in November, we brought him outside for the last time. We found him dead in his corner last week. He will be missed.