Ian and Bev Glen and their two children Charlotte, 10, and Lewis, 12, simply thought a large plastic bag had been dumped along the fence near their Gormans Hill Road home.

“I noticed it last Monday when I was coming home from work ... it just looked like a bag had blown up around the fence,” Mrs Glen said.

It wasn’t until Sunday that the family went to collect the discarded bag at the end of their long driveway.

“My son said there’s something moving in the bag,” Mrs Glen said.

Only then did Mr Glen break open the cable ties to discover a barely breathing rooster in the thick plastic bag.

“The poor thing had been tied up for almost a week,” Mrs Glen said.

“We tipped it out and the poor thing just laid there and it was steaming – it was so hot yesterday [Sunday].

“He was starving and suffocating slowly to death.”

The discovery of the rooster was even more shocking for Charlotte.

She is a Bathurst South Public School student, and was among those left traumatised by the slaughter of the school’s five chickens during a break-in earlier this month.

“Charlotte was just in bits looking at this thing [the rooster],” Mrs Glen said.

They gave the rooster some water and feed and after a while it stood up and began to eat something.

“It was absolutely repulsive and the kids were just so shocked,” Mrs Glen said.

“The poor thing was just rotting to death in there; all the feathers had fallen off around his neck.

“Why would you do it? You know the thing is going to suffocate.

“They obviously just chucked it out the car door.”

Mrs Glen said the family didn’t know what to do with the rooster, which they named Roger, and it has since wandered off towards the Macquarie River.

“We weren’t sure what to do – if he was going to die at least he wasn’t going to die in that bloody bag,” she said.

Bedwells Feed Barn’s Chris Frisby said the young Plymouth Rock rooster had reached the age when it would have started crowing.

“He’d probably started to annoy the next-door neighbours,” he said.

Bathurst Regional Council senior ranger Margaret Gaal was shocked to hear the story.

Any unwanted animals can be surrendered to Bathurst Pound for free. Call 6332 2643.