So yesterday evening I come home to a report from my daughter. She says one of the hens is acting "traumatized" and Jean-Bob is missing. I go out to take a look at the chooks, and while I'm out, I collect the following pieces of evidence:

-- One of the Reds is indeed acting traumatized. She's hunkering down and keeping to herself. Feathers are missing from her back, forming a bare spot, and several feathers on her breast are sticking out as if something tried to pull them out.

-- Jean-Bob is indeed missing.

-- On the west side of the barn is a scattering of a large amount of feathers - Silver Laced Wyandotte feathers.

-- There are canine pawprints in the mud around the area where the feathers are scattered. There appear to be two different sizes of pawprints.

From this I put together the following scenario: one of the Reds wanders off to the west side of the barn, looking for some fresh forage. Jean Bob follows the hen, maybe looking for fresh something else. Red encounters dogs, one of whom actually gets her in its jaws (the disheveled feathering would be consistent with being picked up in the jaws of a large animal). The Red squawks in alarm, triggering the Rooster response in Jean-Bob, namely, to rush in to the rescue. So Jean-Bob rushes in and attacks the dog, who lets go of the hen in alarm. The Red runs off and Jean-Bob fights the dog until the dog wins out.

I ran this by my wife, who said it might also have been a coyote. There are two things about this, though. Wouldn't we be hearing them howl at night, and wouldn't they have attacked at night? I can't see a coyote coming to a barn and grabbing a chicken during the day when the fields are full of rabbits and groundhogs.

Then one more piece of evidence came in. My wife called her cousin, who keeps llamas, to warn her that something was going on. The cousin reported that she saw three dogs in the fields - one Lab, another Lab-sized, and a third, smaller dog. They were making their way east, which would have been in the direction of our house.

So the theory pans out. Dogs grab hen, rooster wades in for a fight, doing his rooster duty by giving the hen a chance to escape.

After we put this scenario together, my daughter said, "I'm glad that if we lost him, that he died heroically. It'd be stupid if the dogs just got him."

My wife postulated that we might have wandering dogs now because we haven't had a dog around for a year or so. That could be true. We've deliberately not gotten another dog because of our recent string of bad luck with them, but it may be time to reconsider. It would have to be trained to leave the chooks alone or watched every second it was out, though. I love dogs, but not when their owners don't take care of them and watch their behavior - which really ticks me off about this attack.

Losing chickens is the price I pay for letting them free-range, and it's a risk I'm willing to take. The benefits far outweigh the costs - so far, anyway. And if the chickens were people and could say so, I'm sure they'd take the risk, too, quoting Jefferson about the price of liberty.

I do know one thing, though. I'm glad I had "too many" roosters. If I hadn't, I'd be short a laying hen right now - maybe more than one, depending on the ferocity of Jean-Bob's fight. So from now on, I'm going to make sure that I always have a couple roos too many. Even if their motives are less than sterling when they follow the hens around.