The Game Rooster

As time went on we had all manner of chickens at our place. They were my mother's special project so we had quite a mixture of them over the years. At one point, she discovered she could buy chicks through mail order. It was a little amazing but the US postal service delivered 100 baby chicks to her on a dusty Saturday afternoon. She had always wanted some Dominecker chickens but nobody local had any. Somehow she found this mail order business that sold them.

The chicks were only a couple of days old when we got them. I had moved out by then but had went home the weekend before to help dad redo one of the old sheds beside the garden to make it into a chicken house. Most of our chickens ran wild in the yard but these were going to be so small that he decided we needed to make them a house to roost in at night. We build a lot of perches just off the ground and put in a nice little water system with a trough in the middle of the house. We put some of the newest old tin we had taken from sheds we had torn down on the roof.

My dad had never seen fit to buy materials to build sheds. He just went on the local radio show that was in actuality a call-in yard sale show, where people offered up everything from tractors to livestock, and offered to remove sheds. What this actually meant was that we would tear down sheds and save the materials to build sheds on our place. My brother and I furnished the labor and we would make as many trips as we needed with the old Datsun stacked up to the top of its homemade sideboards with lumber and tin. This material was all piled up in a big open shed we had where we sorted it and finished removing all the nails. My dad had us straighten all the bent nails and soak them in an open half barrel of used motor oil. When we got ready to build something we used that material and even those nails. A nail soaked in oil goes into hardwood with a lot of ease.

My mother was quite pleased with her new chicken house and enclosed small area of chicken wire fencing. When the chicks arrived she took the box up to the "new" chicken house and turned them loose. I came over that night to look them over as they were something she was quite proud of. Dominecker chickens are black and gray mottled, with a very impressive pattern to their feathers. They are a little shorter and broader than the White Legguns and Rhode Island Reds we had when grown but these were very tiny and still almost black in color as they didn't even have feathers yet.

I am sure she had bargained to get a good price for them and she was very proud of how beautiful they were when they grew up. When they got large enough they had free rein of the yard with the other chickens but still slept in their own little chicken house. As in most bargains, there was a hitch to her plan. She didn't think about what the ratio of pullets to roosters that would come from a random sample of chicks. As it turned out it was about 60/40, pullets to roosters. It could have been worse but having forty young roosters around was problematic to say the least.

The old boss rooster just kind of gave up and trying to deal with that many competitors. They steered clear of him as he would flog any that got close enough but they soon learned to just give him a wide berth. The pullets weren't so lucky. One of the young roosters would get one of them pinned down and mount her and several others would line up. It was gang rape on a massive scale in the yard. The young pullets were so abused that many of them were losing the feathers on their back from the constant mounting.

Naturally, my mother wasn't too happy with this state of affairs. She would charge out into the yard with her broom and scatter young roosters like so many leaves in the wind. Woe be unto a rooster that didn't see her coming as it meant a good dusting and the feathers would fly. This led to multiple requests for chickens for the freezer and I spent a lot of evenings over there killing and cleaning young roosters. The old banty even lost interest in flogging the dead ones for a while, it was just too much work for him I suppose.

The young roosters soon wised up and I couldn't catch one most evenings. The sound of shelled corn in a coffee can could bring every chicken on the place running at our house but those young roosters were soon too wary to fall for that anymore. She even asked me if I could shoot them in the yard but I told her that wasn't a good idea either as the collateral damage might not be acceptable.

At that time, I was working in a factory that made sewing notions at night. It was a sweatshop factory but I was making decent money and going to electronics school in the daytime. I mentioned our problem with the roosters at work one night and one of my workmates told me he had a good solution for that particular problem. When I asked what it was, he said; "a game rooster."

I had heard of game roosters of course. Everyone who grew up in that area knew cockfighting was still a sport/gambling event that was played out at different venues in the area. It was illegal of course but I guess the sheriff's department had better things to do than to go arrest voters who contribute to campaigns every few years and they left it alone for the most part. At that time, I had not been to one but I knew what they were.

"How will that solve the problem," I asked. I knew they had a reputation for being extremely fierce but I also knew our old boss rooster hadn't done much to thin their population down.

"If you take a game rooster home, there won't be any rooster's around but him in just a short while," he assured me. He went on to explain that is why you have to keep them in seperate pens as they will kill any other chicken with a comb on it's head that gives it away as being a rooster. You can still see them today in some areas around here, lots of little small circular coops, each with a small house inside for the rooster. Most of the time, they are also tethered to keep them from flying out as they are also quite capable of flying for short distances.

He went on to explain that his brother "fed" roosters for several people who fought them in the area. "Feeding" game roosters involves a special mixture of grains, peppers, and proteins to get them in top shape. It also involves "training" them for endurance and strength. Every "feeder" has his own secret formulas and methods closely guarded and kept. The "feeders" also will handle them in the ring when they are pitted to fight for money.

I was a little skeptical but I called mother and asked her if she wanted a game rooster. When I explained what Phillip had told me, she paused a little but finally said if it would get rid of that gang of roosters she would be ok with it. She asked me if it would attack people and I told her that it would not, although I wasn't absolutely certain about that. I asked Phillip later that night and he told me that wouldn't bother people but would attack anything else that bothered their hens, including dogs, skunks, and raccoons.

The next night he brought me in a rooster that his brother had decided wasn't going to make a good fighting rooster; at least not for gambling on. The rooster was in a small crate. He was black with red feathers on his head and neck and some white feathers mixed in his tail feathers. He was a little bigger than the banty rooster we had but not as big as the boss rooster by a long shot. I did notice that his legs were heavily muscled, as if his drumsticks would be huge compared to the rest of his body. His spurs were just little nubs, not very sharp at all and very short.

I told Phillip that our boss rooster had huge spurs compared to these and he just laughed. He explained that game roosters don't really have spurs, that they are filed down if they do. When a game rooster fights in a pit they put gaffs on them. A gaff is a slender curved spike not much bigger around than a wire, about 2 inches long with a sharp point on the end. The gaff is attached to the roosters leg where their spurs should be. He told me that it was one way you could tell if a rooster was a pure game rooster. If he was pure game, he wouldn't try to kick the gaffs off like a regular rooster will. A game rooster instantly recognizes it is a weapon and actually gets excited when you put a pair of gaffs on him.

I still thought he was a little undersized to be something that was going to kill all the roosters on our place but Phillip just laughed again and told me not to worry. "Just take him home and put him in the yard. All your rooster problems will be over in just a little while after that."

When I got off work early the next morning, I took him home with me and put some water in his crate. The next morning I took him over to Mother's house. She was out feeding the chickens when I got there. She was very impressed with her new rooster. She told me he was beautiful. I had to admit he was pretty flamboyant looking with his black and bright red colors. I set his crate on the ground and opened the door.

He strutted around for a few seconds before he noticed one of the young roosters walking by and immediately started flogging him unmercifully. The rooster didn't have designs on being dominant so he was trying to just get away but the game rooster was faster and determined and soon chased him up the driveway towards the road. He probably would have chased him all the way across the road if the boss rooster hadn't seen what was going on and intervened.

As the boss rooster took a run at the game rooster he didn't even slow down; the game rooster just veered left and met him head on. They crouched once to jump but before the boss rooster could get off his feet the game rooster was bashing boths sides of his head at once. Every blow was perfectly timed to catch his head between those two strong legs as if in a rapidly slamming door. There was a sound to it that I have never forgotten. It sounded for all the world like a balled fist striking bare flesh. Pop, pop, pop, three rapidfire triphammer blows and the boss rooster went into convulsions, flopping helplessly on the gravel driveway. He never even got a chance to change his mind. He was dead before he knew what hit him.

The game rooster barely paused before taking off after another rooster he had spied watching. This one took off full speed with wings flapping and feet windmilling at a high rate of speed. It was pandemonium in the yard for a good fifteen minutes. The game rooster killed three roosters in that time and set the others heading across the road, up in the pasture and down through the garden as fast as they could go. It was the closest thing to the old tasmanian devil cartoons I had ever witnessed. He was literally a whirling dervish of destruction on anything that resembled a rooster.

Mother wasn't sure what to think. She asked me to pluck the dead roosters and bleed them out. She also suggested we probably should lock the banty in the barn for a while. It turned out that wasn't necessary. The banty seemed to know the game rooster wasn't something he wanted any part of. They lived in harmony for quite some time afterwards, the banty staying out of the yard and the game patrolling the yard and the garden.

Within 3 days there wasn't another rooster on our place. Most of them just left for better pastures but a couple flew in the dog pen with our beagles which was certain death for a chicken. Mother said they surely knew better than to get in the dog pen. I think they did it on purpose as it was preferrable to facing the game rooster.

For many years, we never had any roosters but the game rooster. He killed everything that hatched and grew a comb on its head. He also protected his hens with a ferocity that is hardly to be believed. One of our beagles got out and was chasing the chickens a few weeks later and he made a believer out of her. She ran halfway across the pasture to get away from him.

He lived a long and happy life there at our place. Mother always talked about how pretty he was but she never mentioned the fact that he was the most vicious killer I have ever seen. There is an old saying that nothing is as mean as a game rooster. I don't know of anything that is even a close second. God help us if they ever manage to put their genes in something larger.