This post reflects a synchronicity. I thought of a lot to say at a forum where some women were massaging the collective ego of American men; and somebody "wanted to see a pet rooster."
It's not the ideal season for photographing most birds, but shelter staff who are trying to find new homes for them do. Here, courtesy of Petfinder, is Prince Charles of Smithtown, New York:
He was found wandering the streets, lost and looking pitiful...because it's August. Birds normally shed and replace most of their feathers in August. Some of them look dreadful, and if they're as image-conscious as chickens they probably feel embarrassed...and if they've been the pets of people who aren't getting any more use out of their human brain cells than chickens do, these chickens may even be abandoned because their humans think they've got some horrible disease. Prince Charles the Rooster will probably have a shiny new coat by Labor Day. To meet this pet rooster in real life, click: https://www.petfinder.com/bird/prince-charles-56392993/ny/smithtown/smithtown-animal-shelter-ny53/ .
Here is Roo Paul from Chesapeake Beach, Maryland:
It's not enough that he was born a chicken, and photographed while replacing his tail feathers? They have to stick a silly necktie on him? Roo Paul must be cooler-tempered than many roosters because he is reportedly sharing living space with a buddy, Cluck Norris, who's also been photographed in a tie. Roosters who are caged together tend to fight and can hurt each other. These guys really need homes. Meet them at https://www.petfinder.com/bird/roo-paul-54491509/md/chesapeake-beach/mabels-orphaned-angels-rescue-md477/ .
Here's Rooty from Lexington, Kentucky:
None of these birds looks his best, because it's August. Rooty is being held in a Humane Society shelter where the staff have little to say about him. He can be rescued via https://www.petfinder.com/bird/rooty-the-rooster-56616390/ky/lexington/lexington-humane-society-ky61/ .
Everybody prefers hens to roosters until they've bonded with a rooster. This does happen. (When it happens in cities there is likely to be one miserable person in the neighborhood who carries on about the fact that roosters crow, not just at dawn but whenever they're feeling glad to be alive. The easy way to stop one rooster crowing is to get another rooster who will bite him if he crows, but then the dominant rooster will take over the job of crowing. The easy way to deal with this is enact a local ordinance recognizing that roosters' crowing is not a loud enough noise to do any material harm to anybody. Then the miserable person will have to go and be miserable somewhere else, in which case your pet rooster will have made an excellent contribution to society.) Usually it happens when a fluffy baby chick who's established itself as a cuddly pet fails to become a hen, but when my family went back to the land my father bonded with a full-grown rooster.
Chickens were free to roam in our neighborhood back then--nobody was "protecting" raccoons or possums--and one particularly brash bird, some sort of Game-bantam-Leghorn mix with more white than black feathers, started visiting all the other chicken yards and challenging bigger, older roosters. Apparently he won every fight. "Old Faithful" got to be his name. Some neighbors with whom he took to roosting had less respectful names for him and said Dad was welcome to keep him, free of charge, just for keeping Old Faithful from bullying their roosters. The parents had bought some hens for us children to look after, and it just happened that Old Faithful was particularly enamored of one of these hens. He had never been a pet, but he knew one human from another. "Take a heavy sack to drag that one out in," his reluctant hosts warned, but Dad carried Old Faithful home in his arms, unrestrained and looking contented. After that Old Faithful was not exactly docile, certainly not cuddly, but he liked his new home and respected the man of the house. He could fly, but no longer seemed to want to. He was, Dad said, all that a rooster could be expected to be. He obeyed simple commands, led the flock to the pasture instead of the garden in spring, was nice to the hens and baby chicks, and though he never seemed to like us children, at least he never attacked either of us.
Later we had our own pet roosters, show birds we taught to do simple tricks, and both of us cried real tears when told we couldn't keep two especially lovable roosters as a twin act. "They'll not act like twin brothers long. They'll grow up and start fighting. Pick one and sell the other." We couldn't pick one; each of us had picked one as a stage partner, but both of us liked both of them. We moaned and wailed and procrastinated until we prevailed on a neighbor to adopt one of those birds. Both of us looked for him whenever we visited the neighbor's house for the next five years, and we thought the little rooster recognized my brother.
For what it's worth--color does not reliably predict whatever a chicken may have in the way of personality--the twin brothers had the same general color pattern as Rooty, above. Most roosters in North America have white feathers that take all kinds of dyes well. The ones kept as pets often have gorgeous mixes of colors. In September they grow two long, curved tail feathers surrounded by a fan of shorter fathers. The tail feathers are mostly ornamental and shed easily. The reward for keeping a big clean chicken yard is that many of the feathers you find lying about the yard are clean and decorative. Rooster feathers can legally be used and sold in place of all those protected wild birds' feathers it's illegal to keep, but they're not profitable enough to support raising roosters as a hobby. If you want roosters to pay for themselves most of them will have to be eaten by humans.
The roosters we kept seemed to know that a male farm animal has to make himself more lovable than the female of the species, just to survive. Most male animals are sterilized, without anesthetics, as soon as their gender becomes noticeable, and even then they're living on borrowed time, waiting to be slaughtered and eaten. Well, tomcats weren't eaten, but they were usually killed, back then. Dogs are the only non-human species in which most males have a chance to grow up. And if you ever get tired of a rooster, you know what somebody will probably volunteer to do with him.
In contrast to which, at that time, male humans were expected normally to be wise, brave, heroic protectors of their family. At least they were supposed to protect their wives and children from having to take jobs in town. Around the time I was born, as television became a major part of our culture, comedy writers thought it guaranteed a laugh to reverse that stereotype. The stereotype for shows that were meant to be funny (sometimes the only way a kid could tell was by the recorded laugh tracks) was that animals were smarter than children, children were smarter than Mommy, and everybody including the goldfish was smarter than Daddy. It had lost its surprise value, and men were starting to grumble about it, probably earlier than 1965.
Despite the characters that made Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, and Bill Cosby super-rich, "Everybody is smarter than Daddy" is still a comedy cliche. Men still grumble. Women could be doing the grumbling. In real life most of us have felt that everybody in some household or other was smarter than Daddy, but only if you believe that wisdom and fortitude are carried on the Y-chromosome do you think there's anything funny about it. In real life those families seem sad and pitiful.
Michael Landon's effort, in "Little House on the Prairie," to create another character like Lorne Greene's on "Bonanza," seems particularly instructive. In Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, Charles Ingalls is Laura's and Mary's beloved Pa. No fault is ever found with him. But he's not part of all of Laura's memories--the girls spend time with, and learn life lessons from, Ma Ingalls. Also, though capable of doing farm work, he's not exactly a successful farmer; the family live in holes in the ground and desperately gnaw their way through their seed wheat to survive. But when they're teased about having less than other girls at school, Laura and Mary are loyal, as some of my generation still expected ourselves to be. No whining about how Pa ought to give them what Mr. Oleson gave Nellie and Willie. Laura and Mary recognize that the richer kids are horrid little brats. Pa Ingalls doesn't have to live at home all the time, or bring home much money when he's gone off in search of a job. They just love him, and remember every word of the songs he sings in the evenings, when he is at home.
On the TV show, Michael Landon's version of Pa Ingalls has only a name in common with Laura Ingalls Wilder's version. As a kid I noticed that Wilder could hardly have recognized the TV character; as an adult, watching the reruns, I notice that Michael Landon's character never looked, talked, or sounded like a nineteenth century man at all. A decision had been made to sacrifice the character's authenticity to TV-Land's great howling need for another wise, strong father figure. The TV version of Pa Ingalls was not believable as a serious attempt to bring Charles Ingalls to screen life, but he did a good job of showing twentieth century men how to behave like fathers.
Fortunately, society's expectations for fathers are low. Males are biologically expendable after conception. Women prefer to share their homes and babies with the fathers of the babies, but everyone will survive if an aunt or grandmother steps in as the secondary parent. All a man has to do is keep some sort of job, come home at night, and avoid positively abusing his family, and they'll remember him as a pretty-good husband and father. Some people even become sentimental about fathers whose jobs are classified as "dead-end."
Being a secondary parent makes fathers automatically popular with babies. If Mommy is always there to provide food, warmth, and dryness, and Daddy is there only sometimes to provide entertainment, Daddy's presence generates squeaks of infant joy.
As children develop more skills and fathers develop more expectations, it's easy for Daddy to lose his popularity. Temporarily. If he's been trained to lead or manage adults on his job, as most men seem to want to be, he's likely to be perceived as demanding too much of children. But some day they'll grow up and thank him for preparing them for the company of high-achieving adults, the most interesting kind of people to know.
Men are just desserts for women. Having them around the house as active fathers is a privilege and a luxury for children. Women resent this benefit men get from the law of supply and demand, in an abstract theoretical way, but most of us seem to adore our own male relatives. In fact, we tend to spoil them, which is part of what makes it so easy for other women to resent them as a privileged class.
At a blog I visit often someone commented that she didn't even mind her husband leaving the toilet seat up, because at least he was still alive...I cannot relate to that comment. My husband left the seat down and the floor clean. There were a few times when it was possible to tell that he'd used the bathroom for purposes other than cleaning it, and this told me that something was wrong. As a teacher my husband did happen to be a full-time professional role model for other men. If he could leave the bathroom clean, so can they.
But my point here is that even when a man is blind, and leaves messes everywhere, spilled drinks and shattered radios and all, just a little practice of patience and good will toward other people will keep them happily cleaning up the messes. He lived with a Y-chromosome long enough to go blind? That's an achievement, sort of. He is loved. Women try not to sound like spaniels who have somehow figured out how to talk, to hold out some sort of human expectations for our husbands, but if anything most of us forgive too much too easily.
It can be hard for men to tell because some wives unfortunately don't have their own homes to go back to, so they stay in the houses they share with their husbands and nag. It can be hard for men to remember that on any accurate moral scale nagging is less awful than most of the sins people nag one another about. It might help some women to live with a whiny cat who pushed them to the point of saying "Well I'm not going to feed you if you whine." It might help their husbands, too, to note that in order to reduce whininess in cats you do have to make sure the cat is fed when it's not whining--even if you have to fill its dish very quietly while it's asleep.
I've never had to exaggerate the achievements of my male relatives. Several of them really were legendary. I never said to myself "I don't want to date any ordinary C-average students, second-string athletes, nice ordinary guys who will grow up to be middle managers," either. Actually I don't like obsessive competition, as a habit for myself or others, and the men I've brought home have been able to live with their ordinariness in some ways. Because, in other ways, they were spectacular.
My husband was a Phi Beta Kappa at McGill. Theoretically that's the sort of achievement that's available only to the privileged and would make a person easy to resent. Actually it was one of his most lovable qualities. What made him wonderful to live with was not that he'd been able to cram in enough grammar and vocabulary to earn A's in a language he never used. (He spoke French and Spanish well enough that McGill made him take German. He earned A's in written German and then, if he heard words he had written in German pronounced, he'd say "I don't speak German," in English.) It was that he kept that fantastic ability to learn things throughout life. He used it to learn how to give the perfect back rub, where to tickle in order to start a great pillow fight, and how to keep everything around the house in perfect order, too. I don't even think cleaning the bathroom was anything anyone ever had to pound into him. I think he just noticed that bathroom floor material lasts longer when ammonia compounds are never allowed to soak in.
As fiction readers and watchers men are right to complain about excessive use of "Everyone is smarter than Daddy" being a cliche. As husbands and fathers, they can be legends in their own time if they listen and learn to all those annoying stupid-man jokes.
If you are someone else's husband, not mine, I don't like you very much; I don't want to like you, nor do I want you to like me. You're for your wife to like. You're for me to ignore in real social life, most of the time, and write snarky jokes about in cyberspace. You're not supposed to want to spend time with me. That's the point. You're supposed to think of me as a fanatical perfectionist who only likes super-achievers who are also 6'4" and have perfect cheekbones.
Though in fact my husband was 5'9" and, being 5'4", I liked that about him. In reality my Significant Other's height has been something I've put up with because I enjoyed working with him. Short men should let that sink in. Short women do not particularly want men to be tall but we do like it when the confidence some men derive from being tall allows them to learn things. About how to use and maintain their bodies, for a start.
But for the general benefit of humankind, I would like to see men growling at feminist writers who are not their wives, which is appropriate, and then quietly using our judgmental remarks as a way to learn things about living with their wives. E.g.: You're not "winning" if your wife loves you, or needs your contribution to the budget, enough to clean the bathroom every time you use it. You're winning if you figure out how much you can save on bathroom flooring and decor if you keep your bathroom shiny-clean, all by yourself; and, as a secondary benefit, your wife then wastes less energy on the bathroom floor and has more energy available for tickling and pillow fighting.
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