A lot of what you read on here is opinion. We all have our own opinions based on our experiences and what we read. There are some people on here that I trust, Mrs. K is one. When she says most roosters viciously attack people I believe that is her experience. Mine is different. I hardly ever have a rooster attack me, only one has. I had another one that would not attack me but he would other people. I’ve had a lot of roosters through the years and those are the only two that became human aggressive. Something I’ve learned on this forum, no matter what your experiences are or what you say, someone has had different experiences. That happens with living animals. So take everything I’m going to say as my opinion and be assured others will disagree with any of it.
You will see a lot of people on here that believe in magic. They really believe that certain numbers, (square feet per chicken in the coop or run, number of inches of roost space per chicken, number of hens per rooster, just all sorts of things) are magical and solve all problems. In real life it just doesn’t work that way. There are all sorts of variables such as our management techniques, the climate, the personalities of the individual chickens, and others so what works well for one does not work for another. I’ve had more problems with what would be considered a good hen to rooster ratio than when that ratio was lower. I had one rooster and eight hens. Two of the hens were having problem so I ate them and changed the ratio to one and six. The problems went away. It was not a ratio problem but an individual hen problem.
In spite of that I always suggest you keep as few roosters as you can and still meet your goals. That’s not because you are guaranteed more problems with more roosters, just that the more roosters you have the more likely you are to have problems. I don’t know what your goals are or why you want to keep those two roosters, that’s your business, but I strongly agree keeping two roosters and two hens together is not something you want to do.
It sounds like they are still pretty young. That means they will soon be going through puberty. Things are going to get pretty wild. The boys will have hormones running out of control and they won’t have the self-control to manage that. The pullets mature later and don’t have a clue what’s going on so they resist. It can get really violent during this phase, it can be hard to watch. That’s when you see most of the problems they are talking about above. Often when cockerels mature into roosters and pullets mature into hens they change into a really peaceful flock, but getting to that point can be really difficult.
You say you don’t want to get rid of either or both cockerels. Whether that is the right decision I up to you, let’s work with that. One way would be to build two separate coops and runs. Keep the two pullets in one and the two cockerels in the other for the rest of their lives. In both pens they will establish a pecking order. That may or may not involve fighting but usually it’s not bad at all in either pen. The boys are usually no worse than the girls if there are no girls to fight over.
If you want, after they are fully grown (say a year old) you could try putting one rooster with one hen. Usually by this time they calm down enough the hens are not over-mated, don’t become barebacked, anything like that. I’ve known men and women in their 50’s that are still immature adolescents, they just never grow up. You can get the same thing with chickens, some just never mature. I would not suggest you try this unless you just have to have fertile eggs. The risks are higher this way.
Another option I don’t like would be to put one rooster with two hens and leave the other rooster alone. I don’t think there are any different risks to the hens doing this than one hen per rooster but you need to keep that one rooster alone.
You can always get more hens if you have sufficient room and that meets your goals. As long as you have sufficient room it won’t hurt anything, but if you don’t have sufficient room integration is a lot harder and you can still have problems with over-crowding after integration. There is no guarantee that this will help either.
Another option, if you have enough room that the roosters can get totally out of sight of each other would be to let them free range all together. This might work but to me it’s also quite risky and not just because of the predator issue.
If things go well, I will be glad... But if not, it is something I already expected anyways due to the flock size.
