{"id":347,"date":"2011-01-29T17:46:33","date_gmt":"2011-01-29T22:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chefkevinarcher.com\/WordPress\/?p=347"},"modified":"2025-01-08T13:00:51","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T18:00:51","slug":"thomas-spotlight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/thomas-spotlight\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Takes the Spotlight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe change hens like we change socks,\u201d I mentioned to Abbie about 4 hens ago. Since Lorraine<\/a>, we\u2019ve had Medina<\/a>, Julia, Ivory, Victoria, and more. But now we\u2019ve broken the gender barrier, taking in our first rooster.<\/p>\n

Bringing a rooster into the house would seem to be a very noisy proposition. Want to wake up at 4am? Want to continue waking up throughout the day? They don\u2019t crow only in the morning, you know.<\/p>\n

Well, unfortunately for Thomas, it\u2019s been very quiet. He\u2019s fighting a respiratory problem, and his crow was reduced to a very tiny peep. If I were to translate him into a cartoon, you would see this: A jet black rooster, with a deeply rubicund comb and generously masculine waddle, puffs up his chest, flexes his wing muscles, arches his neck, and gives it all he\u2019s got. Overdub a cat\u2019s squeaky toy.<\/p>\n

Not easily dissuaded, Thomas gives it another go. And another. Whether out of habit, compulsion, optimism, or just nature, he is not one to give up.<\/p>\n

\"Thomas,<\/a>
Thomas, Rock’n’Roll Rooster. (Photo courtesy of Jill Meyers.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thomas\u2014with 40 other chickens–came to CAS a refugee from a Kansas City meth lab<\/a>. Meth labs give off very distinct odors, so operators create an olfactory camouflage by keeping animals on the premises. Put that together: The only way to cover up the chemical smell is to create an even larger animal smell. You can easily deduce that Thomas\u2014and any other animal\u2014was poorly cared for. They only wanted him for his feces, and that never makes for a good relationship. As compensation, he received food and all the vapors he could handle.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s been at the sanctuary about a year now, and in addition to clean air, food, and water, he\u2019s had daily treatments for his chronic bumblefoot<\/a>. Now, with this respiratory problem, he\u2019s scored a room in the big house up the hill with two very sympathetic and doting humans.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s always been a real gent, and as a houseguest he\u2019s pretty near perfect. He keeps his pen clean, doesn\u2019t fly all over the place, never sullies the furniture. He\u2019s been such a good visitor that I kept him near the kitchen when I taught a class on sauces<\/a> this past weekend.<\/p>\n

It was hard to keep everyone\u2019s attention during class. Thomas is strikingly handsome\u2014the cartoon caricature above isn\u2019t far off\u2014and supremely graceful. Even with his feet bandaged and his laborious breathing, he still moves about in stately confidence. There was more than one sympathetic sigh in the room when I told the class that he wasn\u2019t cooing like a dove. He was simply trying to breathe.<\/p>\n

Things improved, however, and within a few days he surprised me with the most remarkable sequence of crowing. I cheered, of course, for it was a great and welcome sound. Loud and proud, and a long time coming.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just the volume that caught my enthusiasm. It was the pitch and the timing, delivered in precise call-and-response fashion. The call: The opening 5 notes of Led Zeppelin\u2019s \u201cSince I\u2019ve Been Loving You<\/a>.\u201d His response: A crow that matched it almost note for note. Each time the riff was played in the song, he responded in kind.<\/p>\n

But it didn\u2019t stop there. Next up in my playlist was \u201cSleepless Night<\/a>,\u201d from the Kinks\u2019 1977 album \u201cSleepwalker.\u201d It opens with a 13-note sequence from an electric piano. I would be exaggerating if I said that Thomas matched it. But it is no stretch at all to say that his crow complimented it in a very musical fashion. All artistic critique aside, the fact remains that he crowed! The crowd went wild!<\/p>\n

I played the opening riffs again, to see what he would do, and to listen once more for their semblance to a rooster\u2019s crowing. The similarity is there, but it took Thomas\u2019 responses to make me hear it. It\u2019s not at all like the overt squawk of Link Wray\u2019s \u201cRun Chicken Run<\/a>.\u201d Thomas, it appears, has more sophisticated taste, appreciating subtlety. Or at the very least, higher production values. (In Link Wray\u2019s defense, it is worth noting that he often recorded his songs in a converted chicken coop<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

So rock on, Thomas. Thanks for the music appreciation lesson, and for the display of grace under stress. Who would have guessed that such a rock\u2019n\u2019roll spirit was hiding beneath all those Liberace feathers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe change hens like we change socks,\u201d I mentioned to Abbie about 4 hens ago. Since Lorraine, we\u2019ve had Medina, Julia, Ivory, Victoria, and more.…<\/p>\n

Continue reading Thomas Takes the Spotlight<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,86,59,102,103,104,101,106,73],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bumblefoot","tag-cas","tag-chicken","tag-kinks","tag-led-zeppelin","tag-link-wray","tag-rocknroll","tag-rooster","tag-stapler","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3475,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions\/3475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}