Wednesday, September 14, 2011

A bit of trouble with Horace


It has been a while since we “Hopped” six of our roosters.  Everything was great.  We had our big white rooster Horace.  A dozen or so hens.  And 3 scruffy young roosters.  We didn’t “Hop” the little guys last time because they weren’t causing any problems.  We thought.

Suddenly Horace disappeared.  He just wasn’t around.  We thought it was a little strange.  We don’t have many predators.  No native mammals.  But there are some introduced ones.  It might have been a wandering cat, possum, or ferret.  But strange that we didn’t find any sign of a struggle.

Well, a day later I did find him.  Alive but not in a good state.  He had climbed under a hedge to die.  I pulled him out from under the hedge.  He had dried blood on his head and looked pretty miserable.  He flapped and cawed and got away from me but fell straight into the creek.  I fished him out and held him in my arms.  He didn’t struggle any more.

We wrapped him up and sat him by the fire to dry off and warm up.  It looked to us like he had bravely fought off some predator but had come off second best.  We decided we would try our best to get him back on his scaly feet and once again assume his role as benevolent dictator.

We just happened to have a homeopath staying with us.  She attended to him.  The vet came around bit later and gave him a jab of something under his wing.  Now I should probably point out that we didn’t get the vet around just for our rooster.  He was around anyway treating a blind psychotic sheep.  I guess that’s the subject of another blog post.

The vet told us that Horace’s injuries weren’t life threatening.  He did comment it was strange the damage was only around his head and not his claws.  Roosters apparently use their claws to fight off other animals.  So their claws get a little damaged.  He told us to put him back in his natural environment with the rest of the flock.

So we did…

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