Animal Welfare United States Project #35495

The Rooster Project

by VINE

Project Report | Dec 22, 2025
Crowing Around the Clock (and the Seasons)

By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary

Pearly, taking a morning stroll today

Did you know that roosters crow all day long, not just early in the morning? That's because crowing evolved as a way for flocks of red junglefowl, the wild birds from whom all chickens descended, to keep track of each other while foraging in the forests of South Asia.

When a rooster crows, he's saying "Everything is OK over here!" From sunrise to sunset, from January through December, roosters at the sanctuary crow to let each other know that everything is OK. (They have other sounds that signal danger or distress.) Roosters even crow at night sometimes: If something disturbs a rooster's sleep, he wakes up and looks around. If everything is OK, he crows before going back to sleep!

Unfortunately, these cheerful sounds are not always appreciated. Some towns allow hens but not roosters in residential areas. That's one of many reasons that most of the roosters who came to the sanctuary this year were surrendered by backyard hen keepers. Sometimes they are sad to surrender beloved friends due to the demands of authorities or neighbors—one woman cried when handing over the jolly giant called Pearly last month—but too many others discard roosters as if they were trash.

That's what hatcheries do too, whether they are providing hens by the thousands for egg factories or chicks by the dozen for backyard hen keepers.

To save the lives of roosters, we have to discourage people from keeping hens for eggs and, more generally, convince everybody to quit eating eggs.

That's why two of our pro-rooster interventions this year were centered on eggs:

In the spring, we created a new webpage listing all of the many alternatives to eggs and also released a DIY brochure with some of that information (and a QR code to the whole site) that anybody can print and leave at their local food co-op or public library.
In the fall, we created a new webpage answering one of our most frequently asked questions: What's wrong with backyard eggs?

We rolled out that page as part of our annual Veg-to-Vegan Challenge, which helps vegetarians get the eggs and other animal products out of their diets.

Also this year, we activated our Rapid Response Network of volunteers to help transport roosters rescued from cockfighting to sanctuaries. The Vermont Public Morning Edition feature about roosters here at the sanctuary was so popular that NPR shared it on its national social media platforms, spreading the truth about roosters far and wide!

I've attached VINE's 2025 Year-in-Review, so you can see what else we've been up to this year.

THANK YOU AGAIN for supporting The Rooster Project and please think of us when making your end-of-year donations!

Sincerely,

pattrice

Links:

Attachments:

2025 Year-in-Review (PDF)

2 Attachments

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Sep 4, 2025
Roosters on the Radio

By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary

Aug 29, 2025
Rooster News

By pattrice jones | Coordinator, VINE Sanctuary

Greetings and thank you again for your support of The Rooster Project!

As VINE Sanctuary celebrates our 25th year, we've been reviewing and assessing the impact of our work over time.

We're especially proud of our decades-long efforts to rescue, rehabilitate, and educate people about roosters. In addition to caring for roosters and helping other sanctuaries to do so, we do everything we can to spread the word about roosters far and wide.

Next month's meeting of the VINE Book Club will focus on the more than 20 books that mention the sanctuary.

Roosters are featured in many of those books:

Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth includes a chapter by pattrice jones that described how we have learned from roosters at the sanctuary and then used what we learned from roosters to help other roosters.

Several scenarios involving roosters at the original site of our sanctuary feature in a chapter by pattrice jones in Minding the Animal Psyche edited by Gay Bradshaw. That chapter provides a detailed description of our rooster rehabilitation process and is also available as a PDF.

Sister Species edited by Lisa Kemmerer includes a chapter by pattrice jones entitled "Fighting Cocks: Ecofeminism vs Sexualized Violence." That chapter begins in a foraging yard at our sanctuary’s original location in rural Maryland, shows how cockfighting hurts people as well as animals, and provides an overview of our rooster rehab protocol.

Those three chapters, along with other essays featuring roosters, are included in Bird's-Eye Views by pattrice jones, which is a book published by VINE Press that includes dozens of essays inspired by animals at the sanctuary.

Animaladies edited by Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Lori Gruen includes a chapter by Cheryl Wylie and pattrice jones that discusses the sanctuary's interactions with backyard hen-keepers and men who participate in cockfighting,

VINE cofounder Miriam Jones writes about the experiences a rooster at the sanctuary in The Ethics of Captivity edited by Lori Gruen. That chapter is also available as a PDF.

If this list inspires you to pick up one of those books, you may wish to attend the September 28 meeting of the VINE Book Club, at which readers, writers, and editors will discuss them. The meeting starts at 3 PM US EDT on Zoom and is open to everybody. Come to share your own thoughts about what you've read or just to listen in on the conversation! Register here.

Our sanctuary and other sanctuaries continue to recieve many more requests to take in roosters than we can accommodate, particularly at a time when the risk of avian influenza has led many sanctuaries to compress the outdoor space available for foraging. This highlights the need for The Rooster Project to continue.

The most recent rooster arrivals at VINE are a trio who have chosen the duck coop as their favored nightime roosting spot. Other roosters choosing that coop include elderly Arnold, former fighter Remy and Aaron, all of whom are mellow birds with relaxed personalities. Elliot sleeps in there too. He's the opposite of easy-going when it comes to humans, whom he sometimes hassles, but chill when it comes to other roosters.

Another trio of roosters -- three juvenile brothers -- will be arriving some time in the next month. At this point, we are only able to offer refuge to roosters in life-or-death peril. Otherwise, we advise people seeking to surrender roosters how to solve whatever problems led them to reach out. Oftentimes, they can solve the problem with our help. We're currently working on a set of resources that will help other sanctuaries do the same.

We'll tell you how that goes next time! In the meantime, thanks and for supporting The Rooster Project!

Books that mention roosters at the sanctuary

Links:

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