I had a friend several years ago, who had a problem with his neighbor’s chickens running loose. It wasn’t that they were running loose, but that they were roosting in his trees at night right in the middle of the hilltop town of Monterey.
The real problem wasn’t that they were roosting in his trees. It was because those trees were near a streetlight. After a short nap, those roosters couldn’t figure out if they were going to bed or getting up. Either way, whether it was 1 a.m. or 7 a.m., they felt it their duty to do what roosters do—crow, waking up my friend and his wife. I’ve always thought that, when you hear a rooster crow, there’s something somewhere thinking, “hum, chicken dinner!” There should be a fable about that sometime.
After a couple of times of being woke up by those pesky crowers, my friend began calling the landlord of his neighbors. No matter what hour in the night, he figured if he was going to be up, the landlord should be, too. The landlord soon started turning off the ringer of his phone before going to bed.
My friend came up with the idea of hiring a local high school student to gather up the chickens, after they went to roost, at night. The boy would take them to his grandfather’s farm, at Dripping Springs. My friend soon learned that his neighbors were buying their chickens from that same grandfather. My friend and his neighbors were paying for the same chickens over and over. The teen and his grandfather were making lots of money from the same chickens and they didn’t even have to sell the eggs.
My friend should have worked out something with his neighbor’s landlord, who was in the chicken frying business. He would have paid for each chicken only once and he could have gotten his money back by selling the chickens.
Later, I was at a flea market, when I came across a battery-operated plastic motion detection rooster. It would crow every time someone passed by. At $10 with battery included, it would be well worth the investment. I placed it outside his front door and called him to come out. When it crowed, he kicked it as far as he could and I got my $10 laugh. He said he kept that rooster until it was lost when he moved away to a less chicken friendly place, in Cookeville.
I guess the moral of the story is: Don’t count your chickens after they go to roost, or it could be the same ones you paid for yesterday and the day before.