Bunnies, Chicks, and Roosters, Oh My!

Years ago, when I bought my first home in NY, my family and I excitedly settled in to our first night in our new home. Needless to say, it had been an exhausting day complete with lifting, carrying, setting up, and all of the other activities involved with moving.

We were sound asleep when suddenly, at around 5:00 am, we heard a noise. “Cock-a-doodle-do!” Groggily, we listened carefully as our next door neighbor’s rooster crowed, although dawn had barely shed its light.

Fortunately for our neighbors, we are lovers of animals of every kind. However, not every neighbor was quite as understanding and the police were called on numerous occasions due to the noise disturbance. In a high-density suburban neighborhood where the houses were practically touching one another, it goes without saying that their attempts to keep their pet rooster quiet was an exercise in futility.

In chatting with the neighbors, we discovered that they never planned on having a pet rooster in the first place! Apparently, on a previous Easter, a neighbor (the previous owners of our house, in fact!) gave their children an adorable little fuzzy chick as an Easter gift. Not wanting to say no to their kids or insult the neighbor, they accepted the pet without realizing all that would be involved with having an adult rooster (or a chicken of any kind for that matter) as a pet in their home environment.

Eventually, they ended up finding a new home for the rooster at a petting zoo. However, their children were heartbroken, there was resentment and suspicion toward the anonymous neighbors who had reported them, and overall it was not a good situation.

Unfortunately, this is a very common problem around holiday times. People give puppies and kittens for Christmas or bunnies and chicks for Easter. Quite often, these pets end up being more than the family bargained for, (if they even wanted a pet at all), and there end up being thousands of animals in need of homes thereafter.

There are a multitude of rescue groups from which you can adopt a lovely bunny or chicken if you truly want one as a pet and have the right environment, time, money, and desire to care for them. However, even if you want a pet, holiday time is not the best time to take that leap. With visiting family, busy schedules, and the fact that children shouldn’t be taught that pets are gifts, it is best to adopt a new pet of any kind when there is no holiday involved.

With a little forethought and self-discipline, we can all have the pets we want and can care for, without ending up with roosters cock-a-doodle-doing, neighbors complaining, and our families’ hearts being broken. Then, we can all have a happy Easter… even our pets!