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In the long-running debate over whether backyard chickens are leading us to the trailer park or to culinary enlightenment, score one for the trailer park. The Post reports that roosters, abandoned by aspiring poultry farmers, are roaming free in D.C.’s suburbs.
Many chicken purchasers don’t expect to get roosters, which are banned in some D.C.-area jurisdictions for their noisiness, but farms throw them in with purchases anyway. That leads the new owners to abandon them, eat them, or give them up to shelters, according to the Post.
The shelters are filling up fast. Two chicken refuges in the area have stopped accepting roosters, in part because the ones they do have are such jerks:
More roosters leads to trouble: The males have a tendency to fight, especially in the spring during mating season. To keep them from killing one another, Cummings houses her 13 resident roosters as far apart as possible and lets them out in the yard at different times.
And here I thought wild pigs were the metro area’s biggest threat.
Rooster photo by Shutterstock.