Meadows' sculptures inhabit a number of contradictions. They are at once organic and mechanised, threatening and vulnerable, abstract but still containing a poignant emotional realism. Sculpted in 1958, Cock was produced by Meadows during the latter end of his animal period, not long before he turned his focus to human subjects in the 1960s. Meadows worked for a time as an assistant to Henry Moore, and it was by focussing his sculpture on animal life that Meadows was able to attain some distance from his famous tutor early in his career. This is one of several sculptures of cocks Meadows produced, the first of which was commissioned for a school near St Albans in 1954. Alan Bowness has suggested that it was ‘as vehicles for the human figure’ that Meadows sculpted animals; ‘these animal sculptures carry an emotional charge that is immediately translatable into human terms’.

Standing tall and proud, the bird’s physique suggests strength, and the textures on the surface of the bird denote feathers and growth, but also appear unnatural or unhealthy. Meadows achieved the frenzied textures of this bird through a process taught to him by fellow student Anne Severs. This involved roughing out plaster on an armature, and when dried, applying a further modelled layer on top that could be carved with a knife. In this way Meadows' sculptures are made very personal, the artist's hands almost visible in the rough textures immortalised in bronze.

The interconnection between organic forms and what may at first seem like antithetical hints of conflict can be traced to Meadows' first interaction with his animal inspiration; the large number of crab species he encountered while stationed in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War. His human or animal figures appeared damaged and battered by war and violence, which worked with their often welded metal or pitted bronze appearance, to make them seem both mechanised and taut with human vulnerability. Herbert Read summarised his reaction: ‘Here are images of flight, or ragged claws "scuttling across the floors of silent seas", of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.’ Meadows has fashioned this cock in the same way one might with a weather vane, with large vacuums at its centre that give a lightness, almost weightlessness to the bird in spite of its material. These absences however, also suggest a skeletal element, with the centre of the bird almost appearing spine-like, perhaps hinting at the destiny of any animal.