I have recently been surprised by how my chicken has turned from a fluffy little bundle of feathers into a psychopathic sadistic rapist.

Chickens are generally considered as comedy animals, frequently portrayed through animations, butt of jokes, and subject to philosophical musings as to their attitude towards traversing transport infrastructure. They certainly don’t deserve this cuddly representations, as they are amongst the most evil creatures around. Some creatures, such as snakes and crocodiles, get lots of bad press, but many other animals deserve it just as much. I wonder what the conservation community would think if it were suddenly discovered that Pandas, far from being cute and cuddly, were actually cannibals and devil worshippers.

When I first got my first chicken, he was thin, gangling thing, who ate everything I threw at him. He would come to my house several times a day to eat some corn, and would spend the rest of the time wandering around under the trees by the river. Recently he seems to have grown up from this child-like existence into a fury of very adult behaviours.

He still comes to the house several times a day to get his meals, but whenever he does I make sure that my neighbours cocks are not around. Before, if they were around he would not come to eat, and he would run away if they approached him, but now he is grown up he has got cocky and has no fear at all. The result of this is that he has been fighting with the neighbours, which has been very messy.

What few people realise is that male chickens can be very aggressive and prone to fighting, but most frightening of all is that when they fight, they will carry not stop until one of them is dead. For this reason most people keep their cocks tied up, but I had let mine run free because he was a shy, weak creature. Now that he is a fully fledged psychopath, he has taken advantage of this freedom to square up to the neighbours, and get into some impressive scraps. Someone was passing recently when he squared up to the neighbour, so they were separated before it got to the point when one of them was dead, but still there was a considerable amount of blood splattered around the place. From time to time someone’s cock breaks free from its moorings, and roams around picking fights. Quite often there is no one to break them up, and so people just discover a corpse with another chicken continuing to peck and slash at it long after it has perished.

Whereas my innocent childish chicken would wander down by the river, scratching at the ground under the trees for some scraps to eat, the adult that it has grown into prefers to spend time in the field across the road, where the old lady keeps her poultry to produce the eggs that provides her income. She has a rather large collection of rather fine hens, and the little psychopath has been having his way with them. I see him chasing after them as they try to run away, when he grabs their neck with his beak, throws them to the ground, and leaps on top of them. He seems to manage to rape a good few hens a day, and crows loudly at his achievements.

I have a good mind to go across to claim half of the eggs as my property.

I am not one to anthropomorphise animals, but I wonder what sort of person my chicken would be. I think that he is the sort of small, hairy aggressive person you frequently find in Scottish pubs, squat powderkegs just waiting to go off. The sort of people you take the long way round back from the bar just to avoid, lest it result in a spilt drink or other minor infringement that would always escalate into a situation with a corpse (yours), with another person continuing to kick and slash at it long after it has perished.

I have recently bought a pair of very young hens, which are rapidly growing up into a future meal. They are stupid creatures that spend the day eating lots and scratching around in the grass outside my house. No trouble at all, which is the way I like my chickens.

Today, once again, a very famous and rich Dominican who has a weekend home in the village urged me to father a child here before I finish my fieldwork. Apparently, this village is lacking in Scottish DNA and I should do my duty to fill this hole. I smiled politely and said that I was working on it, and would continue to do so at the dance hall that night. Of course, I was lying. Just because he has doesn’t mean that I should follow his example.