They are already plucked

This print continues the narrative begun in the previous Caprice, No. 19, All will fall, as it depicts how, once the bird-men have been captured and plucked, they are treated with broomsticks. A young woman in the foreground pushes two of these strange beings with a broom, who defend themselves with difficulty, as if helpless. Further back, two old men, perhaps friars, although it has also been suggested that they may be procuresses, watch this scene. In the background, a young woman raises a broom over her head and prepares to crush a bird-man who is running in terror towards the background, trying to get out through a door through which the light is penetrating. In the upper right corner a bird is copulating with a bird-woman, unaware of what awaits her next.

Goya has used aquatint to achieve two tonalities which he distributes appropriately and burnishes it to produce the effect of a wash. The silhouette of the chicken at the door shows a tonal degradation of the aquatint. The rest of the hybrid creatures have been modelled with small touches of drypoint.

The manuscripts provide an interpretation for this image; the Ayala manuscript reads: "After the birds have been plucked, they are thrown out: one comes down lame and viscous, and two very reverend fathers, with their rosaries on their belts, hold their swords for them and celebrate the mockery". In the manuscript of the Prado Museum it is commented that "if they have already been plucked, go away: others will come. They will all fall". Finally, the manuscript in the National Library is more precise, stating that "after the copulation of the avechuchos, the whores throw them out with broomsticks, plucked, lame and crestfallen: two very reverend friars watch their backs, and they are the ones who celebrate with mockery with rosaries around their waists".

Prostitution became widely known in Madrid, where it was a clandestine practice, as Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, son of Leandro, an illustrious friend of the Aragonese painter, refers to it. In Chant II, page 51 of The Art of Whores, which he wrote in 1769, he states the following: "(...) in Madrid there are more than a hundred brothels because there is not a single one allowed as in other cities, which do not lose because of this; and you Madrid, you would lose nothing, but rather give less scandal that way".

In this engraving the painter develops the negative consequences of prostitution for those who resort to it, which he warned about in the previous engraving. The women, once they have been paid, expel their clients from the brothels with very bad manners. Violence is unleashed against men who have not been able to resist their instincts and who have the complicity of the two characters in the background, who are probably the promoters of this activity.