Commentary : Legal Attack on Man’s Pet Rooster Symptomatic of a Societal Change

It’s a dog days kind of story. Jose Sanchez of Santa Ana, an otherwise model citizen, was found guilty of keeping a pet rooster, Travis, in an urban area; he awaits sentencing. He may be fined or imprisoned or both; in any case, he will be forced to make other arrangements for Travis.

The scandal has not yet reached Mike Wallace, but it did rate an editorial on Channel 2 wondering at the wrongheadedness of the law and translating the dilemma into TV type conflict: Mr. Sanchez has to choose between his home and his best friend.

It’s a sitcom banality. In 30 minutes between Kentucky Fried commercials, Travis could (a) alert the neighborhood to a disaster, such as fire or enemy attack, (b) be discovered as the new Spuds Mackenzie and become rich enough to buy Santa Ana. Or Mr. Sanchez could inherit a resort in Papeete where everyone keeps roosters.

There’s nothing wrong with the law. There has to be a regulation or we would all be keeping chickens, putting Foster Farms out of business, cluttering the roads with chicken crossings and drowning out the sounds of police sirens, construction equipment and 747s.

Besides, it’s not a real law, like the ones for someone’s immediate financial benefit; it isn’t enforced with SWAT teams, undercover agents and chicken-coop seizures. It’s there in case someone complains. The neighbors who complained are the villains, and even they were victims of a social change which has evolved over years.

The man-chicken relationship is now at its lowest ebb in recorded history. After milleniums of close interdependence--closer than man and horse, closer than boy and dog--we have chickened out of our responsibility and betrayed our most domestic creature on all sides.

In 249 BC, during the first Punic War, Claudius was soundly defeated by the Carthaginians after he drowned the sacred chickens, which had refused to eat before the battle, thus advising against it. “Let them drink, then,” said Claudius, and threw them into the sea. He was recalled and tried for treason--Chickengate--and properly committed suicide.

The famous cock crow after Peter denied knowing Jesus three times is described in all four Gospels. A cock’s crow was the signal for Hamlet’s father’s ghost to disappear and for Lear to cease his nightlong ravings; cocks crowing are common in Shakespeare.

The alarm-cock was put out of business by the 9-to-5, Johnny Carson and the coffee-making clock radio. We changed, but chickens didn’t. Now they can only be useful to monasteries and tropical countries--the pre-dawn risers. But with millions spent on genetic R&D;, shouldn’t it now be possible to reset a rooster? Say, the 6:25, the 7:15 or the executive 8:35 cock-and-hen team--he crows, she lays breakfast?

While the legal wheels of Santa Ana grind Travis into chopped liver, in Los Angeles they have their own bird on the broiler. They propose to abolish the chicken’s longstanding right to die as a religious sacrifice. While one admires the courage of their foolhardy stand against the gamut of voodoo societies, this law would really be wrongheaded. Its logical extension is the abolition of Thanksgiving dinner--and thus the official start of the Christmas shopping frenzy. We would plunge into economic ruin, turn into a Third World country, and be forced to keep chickens.

Most of all, we’ve downgraded the basics of the man-chicken alliance: mutual nourishment. We used to feed them table-scraps and grain; they ate just like we did, in fact. Romans fed them whatever they wanted the carcass to taste of--basil or tarragon, for instance. Those were the days of happy, delicious chickens. Now, because we want poultry that costs chicken feed, that’s what we serve them, with their taste preferences not a consideration.

Victorian cookbooks gave directions all the way from egg to stewpot: raising, cosseting, killing, plucking and cooking a successful fowl. As recently as the ‘50s, before supermarkets, one bought a bird from the poulterer, a bird which was not eviscerated. You plunged your hand in, worked it around, and the entrails you withdrew for the cat gave you certain knowledge of the degree of freshness of your dinner. No one wants to do that again, to be sure, but you did know who you were eating and what his last meal was.

Both the chicken and our friendship are now hollow. Our children can easily grow up not knowing what a one-piece, fully feathered adult chicken looks or sounds like. Even the chickens’ mothers wouldn’t know them, boned, skinned, partitioned and ground as they are. By the time we’re face to face, a would-be rooster’s Mac Tender.

I do not propose the end of the chicken industry for sentimental or nostalgic reasons. It’s cruel, inhumane and hormone-ridden, but it’s practical; it supplies low-cost, low cholesterol, tasteless protein to us all.

I just suggest that before we snitch on our neighbor for the company he keeps, we reflect on what we ourselves are repudiating. Is not Mr. Sanchez upholding an ancient pact between two honorable species--a pact we ourselves choose to ignore having made? When Travis crows, is he not reminding us that during the last 24 hours we denied Jesus thrice? Or that each and every one of our ancestors heard that self-same sound in the background, every day of his life?