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It’s been a rough month for Angel Luis Seijo and friends after his beloved urban rooster vanished on Wednesday, March 15th. The disappearance occurred just over a week after Rocky the Rooster debuted in a Bushwick Daily article.
Seijo and Rocky were just enjoying a regular, quiet weekday on the block near Garden Street block and Bushwick Avenue. Rocky was roaming free, as usual, when Seijo stepped away for a few minutes around 1 p.m. to grab a sandwich at his favorite local spot.
“I came back a half hour later and he was gone,” said Seijo, who instantly started searching and whistling for his bird. Rocky had always come running to the command, but this time there was no sign of the rooster on the one way street or at the playground across the road where he occasionally ventured.
“I whistled, and I whistled, and I knew he was gone. You know when you feel something? I knew he was gone and I sensed it right away. I said, ‘Somebody took Rocky,’” Seijo told me.
While the disappearance occurred suspiciously close to the publishing date of the Bushwick Daily story, Seijo doesn’t suspect the two incidents are related. He also doesn’t think the disappearance was an act of malice.
“I got too many friends. I don’t have people that hate me,” Seijo said. “[The people who took him] might see him as abandoned. You have to look at the scenario.”
Someone might think that a rooster roaming the sidewalks of Bushwick could either be a very lost farm animal, or a sinister addition to their Brooklyn digs. Seijo, who had planned to bring Rocky to his brother’s property in Puerto Rico, theorizes that someone picked up the bird, assuming he was abandoned, and might be keeping him as a pet for the summer.
“He’s still alive. Somebody’s raising him and letting him go in their backyard. Maybe they will eat him when he gets older because he will have more meat.”
Another possibility is that Rocky’s snatchers turned him in to an animal sanctuary in the city. After some research, I found that livestock in Brooklyn inevitably end up at the Animal Care Center of NYC in East New York. Now, I’ve watched enough CSI to know that the chances of finding a missing person go down exponentially after 48 hours. Turns out, it’s about the same if you’re tailing a missing rooster.
My initial call to the Animal Care Centre (ACC) was answered by a guy who seemed to remember a rooster coming in a few weeks back, possibly with a crew of guinea hens, but said the flock had since been sent out of the city to a farm he wasn’t at liberty to name. He did, however, transfer me to the dispatch team with whom I proceeded to leave several messages throughout the week.
On my second call, the woman I spoke with said they got all kinds of livestock and didn’t specifically remember a rooster coming in recently. I even called 311 to see if they could shed any light on the matter. A helpful woman told me that illegal pets aren’t kept in the city for claiming; they’re sent out to a farm asap.
After an unsuccessful third attempt at reaching the dispatch team (the ACC wouldn’t give me a direct line), I was firmly told by the man I had initially spoken with that they couldn’t help me any further (what is this, witness protection for roosters?) Word to the wise, if your unconventional house pet goes missing in NYC, you’d better get ahold of them before dispatch does; otherwise your pet is going to find himself in a Splash-type situation before you can say “Old Macdonald.”
Since roosters are illegal in New York, and missing pets aren’t exactly in the NYPD’s job description, filing a police report for Rocky was out of the question. Seijo put an announcement on Facebook; now his friends from all corners of Brooklyn are keeping watchful eyes and ears out for a lost rooster.
“If you see, if you hear a rooster, post it on Facebook. I’ll go and check it out…I don’t want no problem,” Seijo wrote in his announcement.
“There will be a reward for him. One way or another I’ll get you $50, $60. I don’t care, $100. Fifty dollars and a bike. I just want my rooster back. I’ll wash your car for a month. Every two weeks, every two days, I’ll wash your car for free. Bring me my rooster back. A lot of kids miss him.”
If you have a tip about Rocky, contact us. Until then, keep up with Bushwick Daily on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter