Mr. Featherpants
April 17th, 2007by Michael A. FitzGerald
BOISE, ID-
The other day a rancher friend told me of a country girl/city girl moment she recently had with her gay rooster, Mr. Featherpants. The bird is impractical on a farm where the rule of thumb is: don’t feed or water anything you’re not going to eat or sleep with. Still the bird had character and dignity. It strutted the packed-dirt yard, weaving through rusting tractor parts and sun-bleached saltlicks with an air of detached sophistication. It had gorgeous plumage, like it was riding a small boat of colorful tissues. But Mr.
Featherpants refused the hens. As a result, you could eat the eggs, but they weren’t ever going to become chicks, which eventually is a problem. (There is also the important and heated debate about whether sterile eggs are less tasty than fertilized eggs.)
