Hi. We are so very new to all of this. Our son asked his dad for chickens about 3yrs ago and we kept saying no because at that time he was about 7yrs old. Now @ 11yrs old, we had him read a book (which he did over the course of a week) about chickens and then after the family discussion, we purchased what we thought would be 24 hens all for laying eggs from a local store. This was back in March of this year. We've discovered we have 18 hens and 6 roosters!! 4 Silkie Bantams, 1 New Jersey Giant we've named Rocky (I'll explain later) and 1 Partridge Rock roosters. Sometime in May we moved them from their enclosed housing in our basement to outside to an enclosed 10ftx5ft enclosure - a temp. fix. We'd come home to find some of them alive but pecked at and on a Thursday 6 were severely injured and the next day Friday 4 more were badly injured. Your average person would have probably used them for meat, but we cared for them all and brought them back. We found out that the badly injured ones were all the roosters and that they must have put up a fight to save the hens. On our property which is about 3.5 acres in northeast VT in the woods, we've recently seen near the chickens, foxes, raccoons, and a skunk. We don't know what got in to injure them, but we saw the claw marks on the wood to the coop and we don't believe the chickens/roosters hurt each other to that point. Rocky was injured the worst with a broken leg, all his tail feathers taken off and some skin/feathers off his right side. We felt that if he survived that weekend, that we would help him heal. He did and now runs on a hop and walks fairly well. His tail feathers have grown back as well. They have outgrown that temporary coop and over the course of 10 days of our 14 day vacation, we built them an 8ft by 12ft fully insulated house 2ft off the ground. We feel that with their job as our hen layers, they needed a comfortable place to be at. Many of the coops were a couple thousand dollars for up to 12 hens. We did it all from scraps from when we built our home 6yrs back. To date, on screws, fencing, insulation and a replacement circular saw blade, we've only spent $250! The rest were scraps. So, some advice would be appreciated, 1) what to do with so many roosters (our sons want to see how they all do together in their new home before getting rid of some of the roosters), 2) our first 2 small eggs came over the weekend from leghorns which we felt were laying early, but the roosters have begun to "dance" around the girls and been aggressive to mate with them, so if we don't have eggs in another few weeks, would the roosters be the cause of the lack of eggs? Thanks.