Here Comes the Rooster: A Cocky Guide for the Graphic Designer

The rooster ain’t gonna die. The Year of the Rooster draws to a close, but the rooster, as a symbol, doesn’t really need its own promotional campaign. Through the centuries, it has remained a persistent poult.

During the 2005 Year of the Rooster, the rooster appeared on coins (Fig. 1), stamps (Fig. 2), and casino chips (Fig. 3). It also appeared on the usual suspects: t-shirts (Fig. 4), stationery (Fig. 5), and calendars (Fig. 6).

Special year or not, the rooster lends its likeness to bands (Little Red Rooster), restaurants (Red Rooster), songs (“Rooster Blues,” Lonnie Johnson; “Little Red Rooster,” The Doors; “Rooster,” Alice in Chains), movies (Rooster Cogburn (1975), starring John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn), motorcycles, tea kettles, mailboxes (Fig. 7), coffee mugs, cookie cutters, paper-towel dispensers (Fig. 8), Pez dispensers (Fig. 9), chewing tobacco (Fig. 10), quilts, Halloween costumes, Provence fabrics, specialty plates, lamps, logos (Figs. 11 and 12), welcome mats, giant commercial statues (Fig. 13), and just about anything else you can think of.

The rooster can be suggested with a few simple strokes: a body with comb and tail feathers will suffice (witness Picasso, Fig. 14). A mere doodle begets its cock-a-doodle, by which we intuit timeliness. Or else the rooster evokes nostalgia for the pastoral ideal. Or pride shading into vanity. Boldness. Home cooking. Virility. We associate its image with just about anything but the beast itself.

Some quick facts about the beast itself:

• Roosters are bred for show, kept as pets, and are still trained illegally for cockfighting.
• A rooster is a male chicken. A cock is a male bird, not necessarily a chicken. There are dozens of poultry breeds: Araucana, Brahma, Cochin, Delaware, Frizzle, Houdan, Jersey Giant, Minorca, New Hampshire Red, Orpington, Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island Red, Silkie, Sultan and Wyandotte—just to name a few.
• Young roosters are called capons and may be slaughtered for consumption. But what we usually consume, as meat or egg, is the white Leghorn hen.
• The rooster, while it produces sperm from a testicle, does not possess a penis. It has, instead, a cloacal opening, like the hen.
• In 2004, according to the USDA, almost 9 billion chickens were slaughtered in the United States.

If you consider incorporating a rooster into a design, you might want to dig into the facts, history and legends of the rooster. You can slap together a generic symbol, like the lame-o logos for the Red Rooster (Fig. 15) and Chik-Fil-A restaurants, but generic roosters don’t exist. The variety of breeds may provide inspiration, a tweak on a tired icon. For beautiful photos of poultry breeds, check out Extraordinary Chickens, by Stephen Green-Armytage. For background broad and deep, check out The Chicken Book, by Page Smith and Charles Daniel. A wealth of birdy information can also be found in Ernest Ingersoll’s 1923 Birds in Legend, Fable and Folklore, which is out of print but can be found if you hunt for it.

As for references in religion, literature, law and astrology, well, let’s get to it.

A little lightning
For many ancient peoples—the Iranians, the Aztecs, the Chinese, the Japanese, a few tribes in Africa—Earth in the beginning was like a yolk in the egg of the universe. According to the Luyia of Kenya, god made a great red rooster who lives in the clouds and sends lightning when it shakes its wings and thunder when it crows. In southern Africa, lightning is a bird that lays an egg where it strikes. People who are struck by lightning are said to have been scratched by the claws of the bird. One of the Penan tribes of Borneo took a cock with them wherever they went in the forest so they could pluck his feathers and make offerings to the thunder god, Baléi Liwen. Mog Ruith is a Druid who wears a speckled bird-costume and can conjure storms at will. The association of roosters with lightning and storms brings us to The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot:

Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
n a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.

A little prophecy
Roosters swallow small stones to help them digest their food. In ancient Rome, people believed a cock could have a magic gizzard stone, which they called “alectorius.” It was supposed to grant to the men who possessed one strength, courage, money, women, and sometimes the power to become invisible. “Alectromancy” was the name for a certain brand of augury in which practitioners relied on roosters to help them predict the future. Cocks were considered “birds of the sun,” and Babylonian priests would put their cocks on the altars before they made their offerings. Even today people try to predict the weather from the scratching of chickens. In the ’70s, researchers in New York stuck a chicken in a wind tunnel because tornadoes in the Midwest sheered off chicken feathers, and these geniuses figured they could index the force of tornadoes by counting feathers.

A little astrology
Those born in the Year of the Rooster possess the following qualities: honesty, ambition, curiosity, confidence, good judgment, self-reliance, courage, fear of commitment and dedication. Roosters are also eccentric deep thinkers and moody loners who always think they’re right. The Rooster’s color is white, signifying purity and maturity, and the Rooster’s ideal partner is the Ox or Snake.

A little legend and religion
In the Vendida of the ancient Medes, the cock calls men to their religious duties. If the cock crows before dawn, according to Hebrew legend, it is to warn the faithless. A statue of a cock atop a church tower alludes to St. Peter as the head of the church and embodies the voice of the church, calling day and night on men to repent.

In Greek myth, Athene blinds Tieresias because he sees her naked, and his mother Chariclo begs Athene to give him back his sight, but instead Athene endows him with an understanding of the language of birds. God taught David and Solomon the language of birds. The spiritual meaning of the story of the cock and hens in the Gnostic texts—found in the early 1900s on expeditions, under the co-leadership of one Albert von Le Coq, to the Taklamakan desert of Central Asia—has not been preserved or is no longer discernible. Of the “64 practices that form a part of the Kama Shastra,” which, with the Kama Sutra, are to be studied by females, number 41 is “Arts of cockfighting, quail fighting and ram fighting,” and Chapter IV, “The Life of the Citizen,” prescribes that after breakfast, the householder should teach birds to speak.

A little literature
Reynard the Fox, a mischievous hero of medieval epics, flattered the proud cock to lure him to dinner. Geoffrey Chaucer, in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, wrote of Chauntecleer and his hen, Pertelote. In “The Fighting Cocks and the Eagle,” Aesop described a victorious cock being nabbed by a swooping eagle and concluded that “pride goes before destruction.”

More approving of the virtues of the rooster, Francois Rabelais, in Gargantua & Pantagruel, explained that Euclion’s cock “by his scraping discover’d a Treasure” and that the crowing of a cock was said, “to astonish and stupify with fear that strong and resolute Animal, a Lion.”

In Hamlet, Heraldo claims it was the crowing of a cock that awoke “the god of day” and scared away the “erring spirit” of Hamlet’s father just as the ghost was about to speak.

In his epigraph to “Economy,” in Walden, Thoreau writes: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejections, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”

Writing in a chapter in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin observes: “It may perhaps be objected that the comb and wattles are ornamental, and cannot be of service to the birds in this way; but even to our eyes, the beauty of the glossy black Spanish cock is much enhanced by his white face and crimson comb.” Later, Mr. Darwin writes of the rooster that “beauty is even sometimes more important than success in battle.”

A little Latin
Gallinaceous means “of common domestic fowl.” In Latin, gallus means “cock”; gallina, “hen”; and gallinaceus, “of poultry.”

A little French
The emblem of the old fighting Gauls was the cock. In the 1200s, there was an order of knights who called themselves L’Ordre du Coq. After the French Revolution, in the late 1700s, the First Republic installed the cock on its flag. In 1804, Napoleon replaced it with a Roman eagle. When Napoleon left for Elba, Louis XVIII resurrected the Bourbon lilies, and after Napoleon’s return and defeat at Waterloo, Louis Philippe reestablished the iconic primacy of the old Gallic cock.

A little legal history
In Switzerland a man’s cock could corroborate his courtroom oath of self-defense in the killing of an intruder. Silence was deemed corroboration. If the cock spoke, it would be interpreted as an objection, and the man’s story would be disbelieved. [See Walter Woodburn Hyde, “The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 64:709.]

A little gender-bending
In 1474, a rooster in Basel, Switzerland, was tried, convicted and burned at the stake for the heretical and satanic crime of laying an egg, a feat we know today to be biologically possible. It has been documented that Romanian farmers fed their roosters alcohol-soaked grains to induce them to sit on eggs and brood. Drunk roosters become motherly.

A little meaningless celebrity
Celebrities born in the year of the rooster include: Michelle Pfeiffer, Britney Spears, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Goldie Hawn, Deborah Harry, Yoko Ono, Steve Martin, Spike Lee, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Johann Strauss and William Faulkner.

A little anecdote about Harry Truman
In the Truman home in Independence, Missouri, the seat cushions are still on the chairs at the kitchen table where Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman ate breakfast together. After he was done being president, he came home for good and continued to have breakfast, and even lunch, there at the table with Mrs. Truman. On each of those well-worn seat cushions is an image, in profile, about the size of an opened hand, of a red rooster.

A little conclusion
The rooster has had a long strange journey as a symbol. Designers may be tempted to be reductionist when using its image, perhaps because so few of us live within earshot of the cock’s morning alarm. And yet the rooster will still be heard, one way or another.