The Roosters of La Corona
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1.
Since the pandemic started, I’ve spent one night each week next to a farm where a few hens and upwards of sixty semi-feral roosters live. Nobody eats or sells them, and they crow throughout the night. There weren’t always sixty roosters: they multiplied without anyone’s knowledge, by inertia, until they became a plague that was supposedly destroying the greenery and that could invade forests and other areas. Have they done so already?
Those roosters live freely scattered throughout a pasture. Their crowing can be heard from a few different spots that sometimes move, which produces a certain effect that Ligia, the owner of the property, considers “beautiful,” as opposed to any sort of prevailing wisdom or angry complaints from neighbors. In any case, during bouts of insomnia, I’ve been able to cull some interesting facts from the crowing:
i. Some roosters (many, actually) crow in unison, albeit out of tune, with the typical melody of the rooster crow, which, personally, I don’t think sounds anything like the onomatopoeia “kikirikí.”
ii. One rooster and a few other roosters crow and after a silent pause (which is sometimes so long that you believe the roosters are going to stay quiet), another rooster or a group of roosters respond. Here, the melody of the crowing varies and gives the impression, to me at least, that they are improvising.
iii. One rooster or a few roosters crow in a simpler way than i and ii, with a long sound that comes and goes every two seconds, and seems to travel, because it feels like the source of the sound moves, leaving behind an echo.
iv. A lone rooster crows the entire night.
Ligia has organized some hunting parties, after pressure from her neighbors, with the condition that the animals be captured alive. But it’s not so easy: the roosters are quick, agile, and paranoid. The community likes the hens more, perhaps because they lay eggs and have more meat, although nobody eats their eggs or the hens themselves. Ligia doesn’t advertise the hunting parties and, truthfully, almost nobody wants to do it. In reality, people like the hens more because they don’t make as much noise.
Only the 17 dogs that also live on the La Corona ranch eat the eggs laid by the hens, when they find them hidden underneath some shrubbery. Ligia says that it’s a spectacle to see the dogs eat the eggs because they do it with such elegance. She describes it thusly: the dogs grab the eggs with their front paws, crack them with a fang, then suck out the yolk and egg white. One would think, with this description, that afterwards, they wipe their snouts with a napkin.
The most common predator for the roosters and the hens are the opossums, or zarigüeyas, but they don’t get too close to the property because there are 17 dogs (plus seven horses, five cows, an unknown number of ducks, etc. that aren’t being exploited in any way). A few times, some dogs stalk the hens and hunt them, but they don’t even kill them because they are too inexperienced as hunters, so Ferley, La Corona’s caretaker, or the first passerby, has to snap their necks in order to put them out of their misery.
One day, I was the first person to walk by. I was jogging around the pasture when a dog attacked a hen and left her severely injured, dying. It couldn’t stand up. The best option was to kill it, I thought, and it was up to me to do it because there was nobody else around. It makes sense for this to not be your first thought. This option occurred to me because I thought I remembered killing a couple of hens at some point when my family had the not so great idea to set up a small chicken coop on the farm to sell chicken to the neighbors. Back then, I wanted to learn how to kill chickens, possibly motivated by a morbid curiosity.
But I forgot about the violence required to kill a hen. You have to come face to face, applying pressure against a life force struggling against death. This force is a simple, intense one-way impulse, against which you can’t give in, despite every sign of suffering and resistance from the animal. You have to apply the same violence to yourself: there was a moment in which I felt incapable of killing the hen, I held back, then I convinced myself that the more I hesitated, the worse the situation would get for the hen, who was barely breathing, so I forced myself to finish the job.
2.
If you’ve been asking yourself why the roosters and hens of La Corona don’t die of hunger, it’s because Ligia, despite wanting to get rid of them, feeds them with the same diligence as she does with the dogs, cows, horses, ducks, geese, and shortly, rescued parrots. None of these animals generate profit. On the contrary, all of them create expenses that hardly anyone can or wants to pay. Ligia acquired the majority through adoption, because she has a foundation, Animal Dignity and Defense, which really does appear to be a sanctuary for mistreated animals in Santander de Quilichao, a municipality with an expansive countryside located in the Cauca Department of southwest Colombia.
Ligia says that when she moved to La Corona, the outgoing caretaker sold her some gamecocks. She also kept a few hens that were already on the property.
This is how she described the origin of the hens:
“Did you know the roosters were gamecocks?” I asked Ligia.
“Well, yes, of course, but they were roosters. Roosters are roosters. They had roosters roaming around and when they left, they sold them to me. That’s it. Then I bought Marilyn and I bought the hens that were here, which were a few pretty little hens.”
“I’m guessing you don’t like cockfights.”
“No, well, obviously I don’t like them at all. They told me that it was a thing of the past, that these little roosters were left over. Anyway, the remaining little roosters, which are really ugly [I would like the reader to read those two words with a heavy accent on the first two syllables that Ligia added during our conversation: “biiien feeeeos”], got together with my poor hens. And that turned into this crazy situation. I prefer them wild: I don’t believe in caging animals. That’s part of the problem. If I had put Marilyn and the other hen in a nice cage with Bruster, this problem wouldn’t exist.”
It’s no mystery how the chicken population got out of control. These birds mate easily and quickly, more so if they are well fed and free to roam. The rooster assumes a stereotypically arrogant posture and walks (dances) around the hen. Then, the rooster mounts the hen and deposits sperm in the cloaca of the hen through his own sexual organ, also called a cloaca. Roosters can mate up to 30 times in a single day. Apparently, they do it with a small group of hens. The hens can lay one egg per day, which isn’t always fertilized.
At first, I thought the fact that nobody had stopped the chickens from procreating was like submitting to an even more powerful natural force: the free and wild reproductive instinct of birds. This reminded me of how Huellas put forth the theme of this issue, inertia, defined as “resistance to change, be it physical, cognitive, spiritual or existential,” which implies “yielding to the pressure applied by larger forces.”
I suppose this capitulation was also motivated by a resistance to change. In any case, I noticed an explicit antagonism between the supposed inertia towards the overpopulation of hens and roosters, and the work of the Animal Dignity and Defense Foundation, which Ligia leads: one of the most important initiatives of the foundation is supporting the sterilization of dogs and cats, which is organized by the mayor of Santander de Quilichao, precisely to avoid the overpopulation of these animals. To collect funds, volunteers raffle a work of art which is returned by the winner as a donation, and then, the foundation raffles it again, and again and again, until who knows when.
The foundation’s volunteers bring in animals that have suffered serious injuries, like the loss of a limb, to schools to show children the consequences of mistreatment. Some schools only permit these visits after the foundation proves their lessons are harmless towards certain interests, or “greater forces applying pressure,” like the illegal mining industry. On some occasions, in fact, the foundation has been told to “tone down” the videos they show of environmental disasters caused by mining.
Ángela, a woman nicknamed “the Angel of Animals,” is Ligia’s right hand at the foundation. Ángela has been saving animals since before Animal Dignity and Defense was created. She lived in France for a while, where she worked as a housekeeper and adopted a dog. When she returned to Santander de Quilichao, she started to rescue animals and eventually had 24 dogs in her home. Ángela treats animals and makes visits in cases of physical or sexual abuse. She’s in charge of the visits because she doesn’t have a problem kicking down doors to retrieve a dog that has been left without water or food.
Of course, this has caused problems for her, like the time when she took a bull terrier from a guy that had the dog tied up on a patio, where it suffered under the sun and rain.
“When the neighbors called me and I went to the deck, the dog was eating feces and didn’t have any water or food,” Ángela says. “So the guy got in my face and I called the police. Nothing happened. The cops stayed below. They didn’t enter because supposedly they could get sued. I took the dog from that guy. She had just given birth. But the guy took the puppies and threatened me. I’ve been threatened like that a few times. Thank god I was able to deescalate the situation. Afterwards, I spoke with him. I told him, ‘Look, I do what I do for the animal, they have feelings, too.’ I try to make this person aware so I don’t make enemies. These days, here in Colombia, it doesn’t pay to have enemies because they’ll immediately have you killed. If I’m going up where the Indigenous people live, I ask them for permission to enter the reserve and I go. Here in Santander, there are Indigenous people, Black people, white people, mestizos, but there are also guerrillas, gang members, crime, a little bit of everything.”
Ángela manages to escape these situations unharmed, in part, because she’s a cousin or friend to more than half the people in Santander de Quilichao. She assists or tags along for police work, which she considers inadequate. She mixes assertiveness with a type of negotiation process—that doesn’t always work—based exclusively on her charisma.
“When I see mistreatment, I want to grab the person and do the same to them. But we have to control ourselves and start a dialogue and bite our tongues and not say anything in order to save the animal. In most instances, we swallow our pride just to save the animal, so that they give it to us willingly.”
Ángela tells me about a serious case. A couple had a pitbull. One day, the husband ends up hitting the wife and the pitbull attacks him. So the guy stabs the dog.
“According to the lawyer,” Ángela says, “if they don’t put someone who stabs another person in jail, they’re less likely to put someone in jail for stabbing an animal.”
The foundation puts animals up for adoption when they cannot be returned to the previous owner because of past physical or sexual abuse. That’s how Ángela adopted a dog, Esperanza, that couldn’t walk because a man had mistreated her to the point that they had to give her a kind of prosthetic with wheels. That’s also how a lot of the animals arrived at La Corona, including a horse with a broken leg that someone had found wandering around the street.
Another big problem facing the animals in Santander de Quilichao is the fireworks. In this town, for some reason that I don’t know, they set off fireworks day and night. I’m not exaggerating. The dogs are scared of the sound of the fireworks and some get so agitated that, in Quilichao, because of the proximity of marijuana crops in northern Cauca, it’s common to give them a little bit of marijuana to calm down.
In December, fireworks in Colombia get out of control, more so in Quilichao. Animal Dignity and Defense has supported some trips for the youth to raise awareness of how the animals suffer because of the sound of explosives, but unfortunately, these trips have little impact on the obsession people have with fireworks—and not just the kind of fireworks that kids light up on the streets, but also bullets, grenades, and homemade mortar shells.
I have an example: during one of the nights I spent in Quilichao, I heard some sounds that, half-asleep, seemed to be fireworks. The next day, during breakfast, Consuelo, the person in the house where I was staying who prepares the food, assured me that it had been a gunshot. I didn’t want to believe her because she was known to exaggerate. But shortly afterwards, we found out that it had been a gunshot. In fact, they had killed one of Ángela’s cousins, which isn’t so improbable, since as I’ve already said, she is related to a lot of people in Santander. I also heard, on a different night, the explosion of a grenade in the same corner of the house where I was staying, and another day, an attack with explosives at a brickyard that sounded like a rumble.
Everyday life in Quilichao goes on almost always with absolute normality, in the midst of latent violence that sometimes occurs and repeatedly unfolds quickly against a state of inertia.
One time Ligia and Ángela went to a neighborhood with the permission of the gang that runs the area, and handed out food to dogs and cats with a group of six kids, between the ages of 14 and 16, who were completing their volunteer service. They felt safe because Ángela would go to this neighborhood to treat some pitbulls, so people already knew her. But Ligia made a mistake that even she acknowledges: she gave food to a dog without thinking that one of the pitbulls would attack and snatch it away.
Two fights began simultaneously: one between the dogs and the other between their owners, who took out guns and knives and brought reinforcements. The owner of one of the dogs was a young man wearing a hoodie, and the owner of the other dog was also a young man wearing a hoodie who belonged to a different gang, or better put, the other gang. Ángela tried to talk to the young man with the pitbull, and Ligia talked to the other. But, in the meantime, someone had called the police, which complicated the situation because gang members are notorious for not wanting to deal with the police. Ángela and Ligia obviously denied calling the police. It wasn’t them.
Two police officers showed up and Ligia asked them to leave, but they ignored her. Instead, they asked her to get in the car with the group of kids who helped with the foundation and to get all of them out of there. They left the neighborhood, which sat on a hill, and the cops scolded Ligia for having gone so far in.
3.
Ángela and Ligia’s concern for the treatment of the animals isn’t limited to just dogs and cats. The origin of the chicken problem is that Ligia believes that these birds have a right to live freely wherever they want. Nevertheless, Ángela and Ligia, like many of us, eat meat. Does that contradict their principles of animal dignity and defense? That’s what a lot of animal rights activists in Santander de Quilichao think. They criticize the two women: to be a true animal rights advocate, you have to see animals as siblings and typically, you don’t eat your siblings. In any case, it’s simply paradoxical that Ligia and Ángela eat meat, but not the meat of the surrounding animals: the cows they care for or the chickens that wander through the fields. Their self-deception, as it is for many meat eaters, is obvious: forgetting what we are eating or at the very least, where it comes from. And in order to achieve this, it’s not helpful to put a pet on a plate, even if your pet is a chicken.
Ángela says she tried to be a vegetarian, but couldn’t manage: she lasted three months and couldn’t do it, according to her, because we as animals are very accustomed to eating meat. Now, she tries not to eat a lot of meat, which is very difficult for her. The animal rights advocates are right to criticize her, she says. In any case, she says that the animals we do eat should be respected, as much as possible, and they should be able to live in good conditions. But some might say that she says it to clear her conscience.
Since nobody eats, kills, or cages the hens, a dilemma has arisen. One night, during the hunt, when I mentioned how there were actually a lot of roosters on the loose living there, one of the participants made a joke: “Ah, well, they should be sterilized—like the dogs and cats.”
The crazy thing is that Ligia said they had really considered this a possibility.
“I asked Dr. Diego the other day and he looked at me like you are now: ‘this old lady is crazy.’ More or less! But what can we do about it? And so he said to me: ‘sometimes, you can put some pills in the water.’ But then everything will be sterilized because even the birds drink that water, so that’s not an option. But, on the other hand, in Miami, in Key Biscayne, I think, where Luz Helena [one of Ligia’s cousins] lives, there are chickens all around. You see them in the middle of the road. People throw them food. The chickens are famous over there. Well, I have to find out if they sterilize them because it hasn’t gone well for me. They reproduce and also, these chickens are ugly.”
So I had to ask the question that we’ve all been dying to ask: “OK, why are the roosters a problem here?”
“Because my neighbors complain that they make a ‘kikirikí’ [you have to read that last word with a crow that ultimately mimics and amplifies the sound of a rooster, followed by a laugh]. Why are they problematic? Right now, it’s really expensive for me to feed these animals. It seems cruel to me to leave them without food, because they’ve been ‘domesticated.’ But the ones in Miami don’t die of hunger. They have to learn to eat little things. That’s why they live in the bamboo forest, they live by the shore of the river. What’s the real problem with them? They don’t cause harm. Yeah, they do a little damage to the trees. Look at that tree, how they have it, for example. They dry up everything.
I look at the tree that Ligia points to and confirm that it’s dry, with hardly any leaves. I remind Ligia that not too long ago one of the trees by the shore of the river fell (which was a big problem because it damaged the wall of a house and lay on top of the river, which threatened to dam it) and I asked her, maybe naively because most likely both things have nothing to do with one another, if the the hens had anything to do with that incident. Ligia then looks at me as if to say it would be better not to remind her about that tree falling.
“There are a lot of healthy trees here,” she says.
For Ligia, the roosters and the hens are part of the environment, the “ecosystem,” of La Corona, and that seems to be a sufficient enough argument to justify their presence there. Nevertheless, she realizes there are too many and that’s why she reluctantly organized the hunting parties, with one clear condition: “They don’t tell me what they’re going to do with them, I don’t want to know.”
We meet on a Friday at 7pm outside of the house where Ferley lives, the caretaker of La Corona; Darío, an expert hunter; a friend of Darío that was going to keep the hens and roosters we captured; Ferley, who was in charge of the operation; Gabriela, who handles the voice recorder; and the guy who is talking to them. The equipment was two lanterns, a ladder, and a burlap sack.
The strategy consists in climbing a tree where the chickens sleep. It’s easier if you use a ladder and if you’re a little over six feet tall, like Darío. Then, you have to be really slick as you grab the animal, pull it down and put it in the sack. This technique requires a mixture of subtlety and determination, two characteristics that are tough to pull off at the same time, because you have to grab the animal without them realizing it, but with enough force so that it can’t escape. You have to be prepared, because once it feels trapped, the animal starts to move, then you get scared and let it go, which happened to me.
The hunts take place at night because that’s when the hens are sleeping. The less light, the better. The lanterns are only used to find the prey, and afterwards, they are shut off. One of my first tasks was lighting one. If I was a split second later in turning off the lantern, Ferley would come and tell me to do it. Darío was the first one to climb the ladder, the center forward and undisputable natural leader of the group. When he said “ready,” we turned off the lanterns and kept quiet.
It was impossible to see how it all went down in the darkness, but I can imagine it: Darío covertly grabbed the bird (up until this moment, we didn’t know if it was a rooster or a hen) and the bird began to cry or moan, I don’t know which verb sounds better. The sound was like iii, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Afterwards, Darío climbed down the ladder and put the hen in a burlap sack. At that moment, they were quite certain that it was a hen.
Not every attempt was that successful. One bird also managed to escape and went running through the field and everyone standing below ran after her in the darkness, avoiding branches and rocks. Darío came down the ladder quickly and also began to run. He was the fastest (or rather, he could cover the most distance in the shortest time because of his strong legs), but he got tired quickly, he said. Quickly, if compared to Kenenisa Bekele or Eliud Kipchoge, long distance runners from Ethiopia and Kenya, respectively.
In one of many chases, Darío sprinted at full speed and, seeing that the animal was getting away, lept and stretched out in the air like a net, and after, landed on top of some rocks and caught the hen. He came back to where we were, massaging his knee with one hand and carrying the hen with the other. He told us: “like Óscar Córdoba,” the goalkeeper for Colombia’s national soccer team during the 90s. Someone asked Darío if something had happened to him and he responded with his catchphrase: “keep calm.”
We chased another chicken to the entrance of the property, but it managed to get away and went running down the street. We decided it was a lost cause. “It’ll definitely end up with someone,” I said. But Darío said no: “People are scared of that chicken. More than a few are capable of killing it thinking it was something evil, like a witch or something like that.”
In the end, Ligia asked us how many chickens we had caught. Darío’s friend said 20, Ferley, 15, and Gabriela, 12. Let’s say about 15.666. “So we have to wait a few more days before going on another hunt, because now the hens are frightened,” Ligia said. It felt like that number seemed like enough for her and that, in fact, these hunting trips didn’t really make any sense. Supposedly, the last time they had captured 22 hens (or chickens), but so much time had passed that there were probably at least 22 new ones. The sound of the roosters wasn’t as loud the next few nights, but only a little according to the neighbors around La Corona, among whom I include myself.
Ligia told me that they were going hunting so I asked to be invited. I thought the idea to reduce the chicken population was justified because they were becoming a nuisance, and it seemed to me like it could be fun (it was) to take part in the spectacle of chasing chickens through a field and stuffing them in a sack. But I probably shouldn’t think of it as necessary, much less enjoyable. In the end, the problems caused by the chickens are minor, unlike the hippos at the Hacienda Nápoles, in my opinion. Also, one source that I can’t reveal told me that there are people interested in buying the chickens captured during the hunting parties and making them fight.
This exact question of what to do with the animals highlights a discrepancy, common in every aspect of life, between what we think or feel and what we’re supposed to think or feel. Ángela and Ligia, as animal rights advocates, shouldn’t think it’s OK to eat animals at all, but they do think that, and the proof is in the fact that they gladly eat them. Ligia is supposed to think that it’s OK to keep her pet population under control, but we already know that she thinks otherwise, at least in the case of the hens, because she likes the birds to be free and free birds reproduce uncontrollably (are we sure that Ligia doesn’t secretly want her 17 dogs to also reproduce uncontrollably if it weren’t because, first, they are already sterilized and, second, because that would create an awful problem that she doesn’t want to face: that the dogs would escape after smelling a female dog in heat and not most likely would not return to La Corona?)
The mistreatment of the animals (here I’m including the mistreatment and exploitation that many animals suffer because of the food industry) is also one of the topics that would be best to avoid, like the violence in Quilichao: every so often revealing itself before quickly disappearing again, less noticeable for the majority of those remaining. Ángela and Ligia, however, point toward that because eventually, the question of the roosters and La Corona and Quilichao and fireworks and Animal Dignity and Defense is one of those issues, or benchmarks, in which all manner of violence is found.
Footnotes
¹Eight years ago, Ligia came to live in La Corona, a colonial hacienda where only the house and a small pasture remain. She came with her husband (now deceased), her son, and her 10 dogs, which were sent in a van from Ecuador, where they were living previously. Five of those dogs are still alive, though Ligia has 17 now in total.
²The cloaca is a kind of pouch that opens to receive sperm.
³The cloaca is a kind of semi-erect penis that looks like a sack that opens to release sperm.
⁴Esperanza died while I was writing this article.
⁵The Hacienda Nápoles is an estate near the Magdalena River which belonged to Pablo Escobar. There, the drug dealer had a zoo where he brought hippos, one male and three females, which reproduced without anyone stopping them until they became a plague unto themselves through pure inertia. They say that the hippos threaten other species, including humans. Nobody knows what to do with them since the majority of experts believe the best option is to kill them, but there are a lot of activists and people from the community who do not agree. It appears that today there are about 100 hippos freely roaming the river basin of the Magdalena River.
⁶I should say that I didn’t have this information when I took part in the hunt, nor did Ligia. She’s going to be the most surprised one because she thinks the worst case scenario is that the roosters and the hens are going to end up in a pot of sancocho.
Pablo Aristizábal was born in Manizales, Colombia in 1992. He is a philosopher with a master’s degree in philosophy from Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá. For 4 years, he co-directed El Alacrán, a print publication of fiction and non-fiction. He has also worked as an editor of academic textbooks.