hannahbananajo
Hatching
- Oct 29, 2015
- 3
- 0
- 7
Hello BYC! Asking for advice on killer roosters!
We started out with twelve chicks and two of them turned out to be roosters. One is totally fine, mostly because he is a bantam and about the size of a tennis ball, so he doesn't cause any problems. Now the other rooster? Different story. He is a massive Americana and he is CRAZY.
Now we've recently been loosing a lot of our chickens, starting today we only have four left. It began with our puppy who essentially scared two of the hens to death by playing with them, very sad but he's learned that chickens are a no no and doesn't go in the chicken area unsupervised anymore since he can no longer fit through the fence. However, in the past two weeks we have lost five more hens, leaving us with only three left. All of these hens were killed by the Americana rooster, who pecked them to death. We are 100% sure it was him, the first chicken to die was one he had been bullying for months and had holes pecked into her head and back. The thing is that he has killed four more in the past week, pecking them to death, sometimes in front of us. By the time we get to them they have chunks out of their backs and all ended up dying in the night. Now he's going after another hen, she's probably the toughest one we have, but we're still worried. We try to keep them separated but during the day when they're out roaming all ten acres of our property it's almost impossible to be sure.
Now I've heard of roosters killing off the weak hens before, but this guy is going on a mass murdering rampage! Is he just psychotic? We've never had this happen before! What would be the best course of action?
We started out with twelve chicks and two of them turned out to be roosters. One is totally fine, mostly because he is a bantam and about the size of a tennis ball, so he doesn't cause any problems. Now the other rooster? Different story. He is a massive Americana and he is CRAZY.
Now we've recently been loosing a lot of our chickens, starting today we only have four left. It began with our puppy who essentially scared two of the hens to death by playing with them, very sad but he's learned that chickens are a no no and doesn't go in the chicken area unsupervised anymore since he can no longer fit through the fence. However, in the past two weeks we have lost five more hens, leaving us with only three left. All of these hens were killed by the Americana rooster, who pecked them to death. We are 100% sure it was him, the first chicken to die was one he had been bullying for months and had holes pecked into her head and back. The thing is that he has killed four more in the past week, pecking them to death, sometimes in front of us. By the time we get to them they have chunks out of their backs and all ended up dying in the night. Now he's going after another hen, she's probably the toughest one we have, but we're still worried. We try to keep them separated but during the day when they're out roaming all ten acres of our property it's almost impossible to be sure.
Now I've heard of roosters killing off the weak hens before, but this guy is going on a mass murdering rampage! Is he just psychotic? We've never had this happen before! What would be the best course of action?
