Aggressive Rooster

[sandhillchick]

One of my roosters (who has always been friendly) started attacking my daughter today (twice!). What is the problem? What should I do to make him stop?
Thanks!

 

[the1much]

send ya child in there with a broom, and tell her to play hockey with him,, bat him round for 20 minutes,, then see if he does it,, if not,, he just needed a lesson, just like our kids do,,if he keeps it up,, cull him ,, but you should be able to teach them both to get along,, very few roo's are totally mean,, would be awful to cull if he was just having a bad day,,, their like us,, not all days can we be great people.

EDIT: ta say ,, sometimes roo's are just being roo's ,, some days 1 of mine are having a bad day, i can tell the minute i see him,, and the kids and wife are told to leave him alone,, if they dont, and he flogs them,,, THEY get the "speech" cause it was their fault.

 

[the1much]

he's becoming a roo. he is the protector of his girls towards anything he sees as a threat. kids run, they jump, they grab his girls, and are noisy.you grab his girls eggs you move around the pen like you own it.you dont.he does. it IS his job to own that pen. no you shouldnt let him, yes you need and the kids need to be dominant. soccerball him, chase him, make his life hell for a bit.it sounds mean and wrong, but he will never act or be human, so, you need to act like a bird. let him know you are the boss. now just little kicks with foot or a push with a broom wont help, you need be strong and have more fight then him. but, dont injure him, yes hurt him, but not injure.i have had hundreds of roos, my girls have been able to do whatever with all but one.and why that one? well cause he was our first and they and the wifers let him win, and once they win a few stand-offs, its too late. NEVER back down! my roos all had a job, and they did it VERY well. and if i was messing with a hen and making her cackle and run and a roo didnt challenge me, he was supper,, why?,, cause he wasnt doing his job. when they did challange me like they are SUPPOSE to, they got thrown or kicked, and then told good job and got a smile from me.
the man of the house has the job of protecting wife and kids.if your man sat there and watched you being hurt because you wanted a loving gentle husband,,would you want him after?

i believe it is our duty to know about the animals we keep,since they dont have the capacity to understand us, we need to understand them.
i had a blind roo who babysat thousands of chicks, at the slightest peep of a chick in trouble he would come running toward sound, figure out where the threat was and attack. if we didnt have an attack in few days i would go out in their pen, grab a chick by the leg and make him scream. why? so my blind roo could come over and attack me, he would flog, he would bite and i would let him. he would hurt me, and chase me out of the pen. and you should see how he puffed his chest out and crowed after. and seeing that would bring the biggest smile to my face and heart. i let my blind roo feel like the man and protector that he NEEDED to feel. it was one of my biggest joys in the yard. and that blind roo would fight to the death of him to protect them babies.

Jim

 

[chooks4life]

I am having a similar issue with my 4 moth old roo. He has drawn blood from my hands 3 times and he is very aggressive against my 3 girls, pulling batches of feathers from the back of their necks. I am a first time chicken raiser and I assume he's learning how to mate. I will do everything I can not to kill him but I'm not Sure I will deal with this for the long run. I will wait till he's mature before I take that corse of action. Also, I see him take a different stance when he's about to atack me so I proceed to clap my hands and making a ch-ch-ch-ch sound from a distance that seems to work but then I walk away, not challanging him. So far so good. Good luck.

That's a very young age for him to be attacking you. When he pulls feathers out, is it because he's falling off the hen or she's pulling away, or is he the one pulling? If he's pulling them out deliberately, I'd cull. But then again I'd already cull him because he's attacking a human. Sorry, but I believe you'll regret keeping him if you do so.

They're not the utterly stupid animals some people reckon they are, they can discern perfectly fine between the humans that tend them and the wild animals that attack them. They can discern between tame and feral dogs, tame and feral cats etc just from body language alone, even with no previous experience with that individual predator... At no point does a domestic animal need to harm a human to prove it will protect against wild animals, lol, we're not the same thing in their minds.

I truly wonder why some people keep domestic poultry at all since domestic traits seems to be abhorrent to them and they're working to undo thousands of years of careful selection to procure exactly that domesticity, by breeding human-aversion back into them.

There's a great chance this rooster could do you or your hens serious, permanent harm or even kill you or someone else (toddlers are their usual victims among humans). Have you ever seen a rooster attack a child? In a matter of a few seconds he can have done irreparable, fatal harm to them, before anyone can intervene; they can also jump to an adult's head height and stab or slash multiple times per second with both spurs. Many prefer to attack from behind, because roosters who attack humans are almost always cowards and bullies. Same as roosters who harm hens or chicks.

Now you're probably thinking something like: "well, I don't have kids"/"I don't allow kids unsupervised around them" or "but he's caged", etc... but please bear in mind the long term consequences of your keeping him. Aggression is a strongly heritable trait, along with the triggers for that aggression and the preferred method of carrying it out; he can pass on his genetics many hundreds of times in his life, even thousands of times; even those sons and daughters who seem tame are carrying his traits, and they can (and do) emerge without warning.

Whoever keeps and breeds such violent human-attackers isn't ever going to be able to track their animals' descendants comprehensively or ensure that before they die, they've wrapped up their flock's malignant little genepool so it never leaks out and pollutes better, peaceful ones.

Especially because people who breed chooks that attack people believe it's a good trait, as evidenced by some here; now, I understand that point of view, but the potential ramifications of it I believe render it unjustifiable.

Imagine being responsible for breeding an animal that kills a child. Talk about a terrible legacy. That's exactly the sort of thing you are potentially doing every time you decide to keep a human-aggressive rooster; they're potentially lethally dangerous livestock and should be considered just the same as a dog that mauls. Socially unacceptable to keep and reproduce.

The responsibility for controlling your violent animals, preventing them from harming others, depends in part on you not propagating their genetics. Unfortunately some people are not socially responsible when it comes to animals demonstrating desire and having capacity to be killers.

I wouldn't waste the resources on him. A decent rooster who treats humans and hens with respect could be taking his place; instead roosters are killed for want of a good home while people persist with pieces of fecal matter who brutalize animals and people they have no justification for harming. A good rooster will defend hens without harming people, it's a false correlation to think that he's got to be an out of control psychopath who specializes in bullying in order to also be a good rooster.

Best wishes with him.

 

[wonkyflock14]

Thank you Chooks, I appreciate the straight-forward answer. I am certainly not against culling the roo because I may as well eat him if I can't get eggs from him. My fiancee wanted to breed him and see how offspring from our roo (EE) plus our different breeds of pullets would look. I don't really want to deal with an aggressive bird for years, though, especially if it is genetic. I have read various solutions to prove yourself "alpha," I just wanted to know if there was any way to reform him. Now that I feel confident that there is not, I reckon I will have a chat with the fiancee and see if I can convince that culling him is best.

 

[CrazyTalk]

This week, he finally went too far. I reached out to pick up one of the hens and he flared up and jumped at me. We had a standoff for a few minutes where he jumped at me and I kicked him away. Finally he backed off and wouldn't come near me. Today, however, he was raring to go first thing this morning and we had to have another standoff.

Acting like a rooster in response to a rooster acting like a rooster to get a rooster to not act like a rooster is never going to work.



You don't want to be the alpha rooster. You want to not be a rooster.

 

[DRGLENNON]

Not sure why the kick the crap out of it and beat it with a broom is the rooster friendly advice and cull is considered mean. Imagine if someone suggested doing that to their puppy........

Ours just got worse and worse, I did the catch and hold techniques and it was fairly well behaved round me but it would throw itself at my youngest daughter through the wire and in the end she was too scared to go near the other chickens. It attacked my eldest daughter one day who never has anything to do with them (in fact she is at that age we sometimes wonder if she remembers there is an outside ) and as she had heard us talking she chased it down and caught it to hold. I kinda stood there stunned to be honest as I never expected her to not run, I had been on my way to get it when it happened and it actually stalked her. It got closer as she turned her back and stopped when she looked towards it. She had hold of it very proud of catching him and he flicked his head round and took a bite drawing blood on her cheek just below her eye.

So, I guess what I'm saying is till you have decided if you are going to get rid of it or try teaching it you are boss you must keep the kids away from it. If you decide to use the rooster taming techniques be prepared to do it every day and realise you need to teach it that it is the whole family not just you so everyone is going to have to take turns holing it under their arms. Can't tell you how ours turned out as around the same time the neighbours lodged an official complaint about his crowing and I have to say it was sort of a relief not to have to deal with it any longer.

I ended up with a cockerel that was supposed to be a pullet. I've kept him because he is so well behaved. I have no real need for him but the stories of all the aggressive roos I can't just cull such a well behaved one. I think if some people could experience the difference it might change some minds. Lots of good roos out there, no need to fight a bad one.

 

[scooter147]

Don't know where you live but it is going to be a chilly weekend here which is good for chicken-n-dumplings

Don't take the chance of your daughter getting seriously injured. CULL IT.

 

[PaintedMeadows]

We have one of those too. He attacks both of my kids, the dog and the cats so tomorrow he is on the cull list. Too scarey what could happen. He draws blood out of the blue, just chases them down when they are walking away or just playing on the lawn. Crazy idiot. I know it will be hard but cull him.

 

[crtrlovr]

Quote:
How old is the rooster, how old is the child, what was happening when the roo attacked, etc. Too many variables to just say "cull it". Is the roo going through his adolescence? Is the child a very small child and thus seems a "threat" or "rival" or "intruder" in the eyes of the roo? Was something else happening that had the flock upset? IMHO some people on here are WAY too quick to say "cull" i.e. "kill" when some rehabilitation will work wonders on lots of roos ESPECIALLY if they've "always been friendly" as you say yours has. GIVE HIM A CHANCE! Read RoosterRed's page on roo behavior/rehab, separate him from your child or vice versa, and give the roo a chance to grow up if he's not already mature. If he is, a little behavior modification may make all the difference in the world.