They may be "caves" in Florida, but the rest of the world calls them aquifers. They carry most of the regions' drinking water. Any imbalance in this system can be serious. Tsimis' long underground residence is beginning to show......
Date: Fri, Oct 4, 2002, 11:06pm To:
donald767@webtv.net Subject: Hot off the wire. ...
This came in tonight off the wire. ... we're trying to get room for it in
tomorrows paper
This from the state where Clifton lives!
Alan (at work)
-----
Scripps Howard News Service
Must credit St. Petersburg Times
With photo/graphic: SH02J077ROOSTERATTACKS By KELLEY BENHAM
St. Petersburg Times
TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. -- When they heard the screams, no one suspected the
rooster.
Dechardonae Gaines, 2, was toddling down the sidewalk Sept. 30 lugging her Easy Bake Oven when she became the victim in one of the weirder animal attack cases police can recall.
In the cluster of beige houses where Dechardonae lives, man and chicken have coexisted peacefully for years in quiet defiance of city ordinance. That ended when authorities apprehended the offending rooster, named Rockadoodle Two, and its sister, named Hen. Hen was not involved in the attack, police said.
The rooster struck around noon as Dechardonae ventured from her house in the middle of the cluster to visit her Uncle Tony, waiting in the driveway. It's a short walk, even if you're 3 feet tall and carrying a toy oven. Tony Kramer, 44, heard the little girl shrieking, spun around, and saw the rooster.
Rockadoodle Two had knocked the 27-pound girl flat on her belly and was pummeling her with beak, claws and blue-black wings. "He was beating the crap out of her," said her mother, Lori Current, 27. "A freaking rooster, you know?"
Kramer ran for the girl, snatched her up by one arm and chased the bird off, waving his arms and shouting, "Oooh, get! Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!" The man and the girl had taken about three steps when the rooster attacked again, knocking the screaming girl to the grass a second time. Kramer swatted at the rooster, backhanded, and it shuffled off. He could not pick the girl up because he has a bad hip, he said, so he took his niece by the hand and headed for her mother's house. But Rockadoodle Two flew at the girl a third time, latched onto her narrow shoulders and hammered at her face from behind. Kramer knocked the rooster down, but it didn't run away this time. It glared at him.
So he kicked it.
The bird flew to a porch nearby, still staring. It puffed its chest and ruffled its feathers.
"He just sat there, all bold," Current said. "That chicken was not scared," Kramer said. The neighborhood has never had any chicken trouble beyond the usual scratching and crowing, Kramer said.
Everybody there knew Rockadoodle Two. Neighbors described the rooster as a normally well-behaved bird from a good family. Its father, Rockadoodle, and mother, one-legged Henny Penny, lived in the neighborhood until their deaths by pit bull and heat stroke, respectively.
Hen was captured easily, but Rockadoodle Two led six people on a chase. They flushed the bird out from under a house with a cane fishing pole. But the rooster dodged the Humane Society officer's net, eluded a couple of flying grabs, shucked and bobbed and skittered through the sandspurs and weeds. Finally, the officer tackled him.
"This was no scrawny rooster," Current said. Rockadoodle and Hen were taken to the Humane Society of North Pinellas, said executive director Rick Chaboudy. From there, they were sent for rehabilitation in Odessa, probably permanently, he said. This is the city's first rooster attack in recent memory, said Tarpon Springs Police Sgt. Jeffrey Young.
"It does not appear to be epidemic," he said.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service,
http://www.shns.com.)
