Why Rooster Rescue "couldn't" be involved in the City's Rooster Roundup:
1. No prior City notice to owners of poultry to pen their flocks. Some people are still under the mistaken belief that it is "illegal to pen chickens" in Monroe County.
2. No City provisions to deal with these realities:
a. The Housing Authority properties are a major chicken hatcher; however, KWHA has apparently no policy and no enforcement about penning chickens or banning them.
b. The Chicken Boys: kids who are stealing chickens, mutilating them, fighting them, and releasing them where they are not wanted. Not addressed by City at all. We need a 4-H program to "snag" these kids into humane husbandry and halt the random rooster relocation.
c. People still bring in new chickens and release them.
d. A plan to trap chickens and send them to Tampa is an invitation to trouble in Hillsboro County over our "dumping" on them of our "Horrifying, Jurassic-Park-like chickens (as the press called them when we sent a brood of chickens to reside in Eau Galle).
e. Many people in the Keys will adopt hens. Most will not take cocks. Fifty percent of all chickens are roosters. Are they going to magically become "layers" when they reach Tampa?
f. Thrown together in a 20-by-20 holding cage at the Sheriff's zoo, the larger resident roosters will kill all the smaller, newer ones before they can be relocated.
3. The City's proposed handling of the chicken crisis offers chicken haters everything they ask; chicken lovers, nothing.
4. To join this "rooster roundup" would be to condone the City's allegations that chickens are responsible for all the fecal coliform causing the closings of Rest Beach, and that they somehow "threaten the Key West environment" more than cats, dogs, bums and sea birds. They certainly do not!