There's a funny piece in the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rooster25-2008may25,0,4480585.storyabout how an Hispanic neighbourhood is turning into a barnyard -- and not everybody's pleased-

"The crowing -- and bleating, quacking, honking, oinking and neighing -- has been a growing source of irritation, with callers lighting up city phone lines demanding that officials do something" writes the Times.  

Particularly about the Cockadoodle doo! Tony Johnson, who lives in Southeast L.A..... has fantasized about silencing the birds permanently. "Boom. Boom. Boom," he said, pantomiming how he would do it.

 "I can't sleep," said Perry Partee, 55, who lives near Watts. He sternly dismissed the conventional wisdom that roosters crow at dawn; in fact, he said, they often get going much earlier.

I found an NYT report from September 14, 1904, about the art of cock crowing -- in France, the best crowers were considered to make the hens lay better, and cocks were being trained to crow effectively.  The cocks were kept in covered cages, the covers whipped off once a day to ensure a burst of long sustained arias.

Complaints about cocks' lousy timekeeping miss the point. According to the Aberdeen Bestiary, the cock's crow has a message.  Cocks crow loudest in the darkest hours of the night and thus "evoke the terrors of eternal judgement at the top of their voice" and only when "they realize that the light of truth is already present in the hearts of their listeners" do they crow less forcefully.

Just what we need: one more moral arbiter.