A Brooklyn cop saved a rooster from most certain death last week after spotting the sickly bird crossing a road in Flatbush. Hero that he is, that rooster now has a happy home at an upstate farm sanctuary, which is just something for you to ponder over your chicken dinner tonight.
Sergeant Anthony Egan of the 67th Precinct says he and his partner saw the errant rooster attempting to cross the road at Flatbush and Snyder Avenue last Thursday. "Another sergeant I was with pointed it out. He goes, 'Hey, there's a chicken,'" Egan told us. "And I wasn't paying attention, so I said, 'What is he doing?' And he goes, 'he's crossing the road.'" The two sergeants chuckled, but when Egan got a closer look at the rooster, he saw something was wrong—he pulled over, got out of his car, and scooped the little guy up. "He looked pretty beat up and malnutritioned," Egan said. "So we took him back to the precinct."
Egan put the rooster in a kennel and stayed with him after hours, forming a bond with his new feathered friend. "I was actually contemplating taking him home and putting him in my backyard," Egan, who lives in Staten Island, said. "But the more I Googled what went into caring for chickens and roosters, the more I was like, you know what, I'm not really equipped with like feeding lamps and things like that because the winter's right here. And in case he got as noisy as everything online said, my neighbors will probably kill me." ["Neighbors Want To Rub Out Cop's Noisy Cock" -- The NY Post.]
Instead, the sergeant contacted Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY—the shelter director, Susie Coston, agreed to come get the rooster and drive him to safety upstate.
Egan had to surrender the bird, but he agreed it was best for everyone. "I didn't want to neglect him, because I'm always away, I'm in the reserves, I'm always working, and I didn't want to just dump him on the shelf because ultimately if they can't find somewhere for him, who knows what will happen to him?" he said. And once the rooster was brought into the sanctuary, he was given fluids and a health check, and workers say they'll be able to nurse him back to health.
But before Egan said goodbye to his beleaguered cock, the sergeant gave him a name. "We named it Justice," Egan said, though that moniker has not stuck. "I believe it's been renamed Moe. But when I surrendered him, I named him Justice."
