Dear Editor: Why current criminals make me miss the ‘fowl tief’

“[…] The old Caribbean fowl thief occupied a strange cultural category. He (mainly men were the culprits) was a criminal, a nuisance, folk trickster, survivalist, but rarely an existential threat. He stole chickens, your pet birds, mangoes, goat, maybe coconuts.

“[…] What many people mourn today is the transition from petty subsistence theft to industrialised criminality, gang violence, contract killings, home invasions, kidnapping, narcotics economies, militarized firearms…”

In the following Letter to the Editor, Orson Rogers of Belmont explains why he now misses the ‘tief’ of yesteryear, in a new era of disconnected violence:

In my younger days, the greatest neighbourhood pest was the “fowl thief”. He would enter your chicken coop at night with a crocus bag and tief your fowls. I never thought that I would long for the days of those criminals

The old Caribbean fowl thief occupied a strange cultural category. He (mainly men were the culprits) was a criminal, a nuisance, folk trickster, survivalist, but rarely an existential threat. He stole chickens, your pet birds, mangoes, goat, maybe coconuts.

People cursed him, joked about him, sometimes beat him if caught—but he generally existed inside a shared moral ecosystem. There were boundaries. He avoided unnecessary violence, killing, and terrorising the entire community.

In much of the Caribbean, especially rural and semi-rural communities, the fowl thief was almost a social archetype. He appears in calypso, village stories, comedy, police blotters, and oral folklore.

What many people mourn today is the transition from petty subsistence theft
to industrialised criminality, gang violence, contract killings, home invasions, kidnapping, narcotics economies, militarized firearms.

The transformation from the rogue, hustler, stickfighter, or thief into the modern gangster has been shaped by the new cocaine routes, political patronage, and imported weapons cultures.

The older criminal economy often reflected poverty and opportunism. The newer one reflects transnational trafficking, state corruption, social fragmentation, weakened community controls, and hyper-violent masculinity, shaped by global criminal markets.

So, when older Trinidadians say things like “Boy, give me back the days of the old fowl thief,” they are often making a deeper statement.

They long for a community once felt governable, a time when violence had limits and criminals were still socially embedded, and fear had not yet become ambient.

There is also a class and historical dimension. The fowl thief emerged from:

• rural deprivation,
• plantation poverty,
• informal economies,
• survival cultures after slavery and indentureship.

He was often viewed as morally wrong but still recognisably human.

Modern organised violence can feel anonymous, heavily armed, and disconnected from communal accountability. Thus, our reflection is less about romanticising theft than about recognizing how the scale and character of social violence have changed.

What I am expressing is not really nostalgia for the fowl thief himself. It is nostalgia for a social order in which criminality still operated within recognisable limits.

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