From rescued, then attacked then becoming a cockadoodle dad....

We live in a rural town , on quite a big block (half an acre) ,with a little weatherboard house nestled in the middle. Our yard is full of fruit trees and fences on 3 sides but we have no front fence, so every now and then we get an animal of some sort wander in..

We have had a cow, a couple of rams, a few dogs and cats, and we have had some possums set up house in our roof and fruit bats hanging in our fig tree.

One day, a few years ago we had a rooster wander in. Like most of the animals that came into our yard before, we reached out on the local neighbourhood watch facebook page, and rang around to see who owned him but to no avail, so we decided to put him in with our chooks.

He crowed every morning and grew into a rather large rooster.He had lovely colors on him and was hard to catch when we let him out for a run.

He ended up on his own for a few years .We decided against getting more chooks due to them having been attacked by foxes and stray dogs and we had to put the chooks down. The rooster had been unharmed.

In the end he was left in the coop all day every day due to the risk of being attacked again..and i used to feel sorry for him not being able to come out during the day as the kids were at school ,husband was at work and i am disabled and cant walk very far ,so we couldnt let him out as no one was there who could chase and catch him to put him back in the coop.

We had tried a couple of times to give him away to go to a better home where he could roam free, but there were no takers.

Then a few weeks ago, we had a storm.. we have had storms before and they had never done any damage to the coop, but this time we think something had tried to get in and attack him during the storm.

The coop had sustained damage due to the other attacks , and we had it bordered up , but this time the roof had caved in and there were holes ripped in the sides .

We knew the poor thing had been attacked when we found him the next morning standing on the back porch, shaking like a leaf and a trail of feathers from the back porch to the coop.

There was a small amount of blood of him and he didnt move for a couple of hrs.We luckily had a large box on hand so we put him in there on top of some old towels with some water and food, which he didnt touch for half the day.

This time when i got on facebook i told the story of what the poor little thing had been through and finally a couple of days later..a wonderful lady named Julie, came to his rescue.

She already had heaps of animals and chooks and plenty of space for him to run around in.

She fell in love with him as soon as she saw him and was keen to find out his breed and to hopefully get some chicks out of him.

We were not sure that he would survive the next few days ,after looking so traumitized..then a few weeks later we received a message, that not only was he thriving, but he had 2 girlfriends and was going to be a dad too!

We were so happy for our rooster ..now he is free to hang out with the girls ,roam around to his hearts content and the guilt has now lifted ,about not being able to get him out of the bordered up coop he was confined to.