What if

[Chambertin]

Too bad.
Live close to the border?
I can neither confirm or deny that any Don Cherry Molson mini kegs ever crossed the border in my trunk.
The list only gets longer from there.

Borders are fun!

 

[wyoDreamer]

If the carcass looks too scrawny when you butcher them, just stick them in the crock pot and stew them down. Strip the meat off the bones and enjoy! Suggested dishes include: chicken enchiladas, chicken tacos, pulled chicken bar-b-que sandwich, shredded chicken on salad greens, chicken and dumplings, and of course - good ole' chicken soup. You can freeze the resulting stock for using later, if you need to.

 

[AinaWGSD]

I know this is an older thread, but I wanted to share my own experience. Roosters are not banned in the town where I live, and I do know one person who has successfully kept roosters in town for several years now. So we decided to give it a try. We were fine for 6 months, then one of our neighbors decided to call animal control rather than coming to us about the problem they had with the rooster crowing. At that point, our Ameraucana rooster was tough enough that we used him for coq au vin. But shortly after we had to dispatch our rooster, we did set every egg that we had sitting on our counter. We put 32 eggs in the incubator, and had 19 hatch, just over half of which were boys. Most of them are either purebred Ameraucana (we have one Ameraucana hen) or crosses with our EE, and 6 of them are crosses with our speckled sussex (hatchery stock). Last week I came home from work at lunch to check on the chickens and found one of the 14 week old cockerels dying. I decided to end it so that we could still eat him rather than waiting for nature to take it's course and have to throw him out.

Yes, he was a bit scrawny. Not much breast meat on him, but enough on each breast to make one decent sized serving of meat. For our family of two adults and a toddler it was plenty for one meal plus leftovers (which I had for both breakfast and lunch the next day). We rested him in the fridge for almost a week, then brined him for 8 hours. We butterflied him and cooked him whole on the grill. I'm not sure if it was because he was one of our chickens that we raised or the brine (possibly a combination of both), but it was just about the best chicken I've ever had. I did weigh him before we added the brine to the bag after removing the neck and backbone and he weighed in at 1lb 11oz. A lot of people would say that he was too small to be worth the effort of butchering. But, IMHO, the quality of what little meat was there was most definitely worth the effort!

The rest of my cockerels will be 16 weeks on Monday and so far no one has started crowing yet. Most of the people in town that I've talked to who have had accidental cockerels have said that theirs usually didn't start crowing until 5 months old. I'm hoping to have all of mine processed (doing it over a few weekends in batches of 3-4) by then to avoid crowing that disturbs the neighbors.