Aggressive Rooster

[chooks4life]

Even though I've been culling against aggression for quite a few years now I still recall how hard it can be and keep in mind that it can be upsetting advice to give. It so often sounds callous, no matter what the intention is. Almost as a rule though people are sympathetic when they do give such advice. They've almost always been in that exact position themselves.

Most of us started with wanting to do everything to change them, give them a chance, then ended up giving up after it doesn't work.

There's always some exceptions to the rule, but they're too few for it to be sound advice to regularly hand out, to newbies, to try to work with a dangerous rooster. It'd be a bit like recommending someone try to work with a vicious chihuahua with little or no prior experience with dogs, never mind aggressive ones, though to be fair a normal sized rooster can do more damage than the average chihuahua.

Point is that it's running a risk that's not necessary to run and the task is generally too difficult with too low success rates for experienced experts, never mind newbies, to be well advised to tackle it.

Really, so much depends on your situation. I agree with Emily's post, when kids are involved... Not a good idea to risk it.

Even a Silkie can do some permanent harm. I had deep tissue and bone bruising from one purebred bantam Silkie male owned by one breeder who spent her days being chased around the yard by him. Absolutely crazy. If he'd had decent spurs (his were wobbly and blunt due to wonky feet genetics) he would have cut my finger tendons and stabbed deep between the bones of my hands. If I'd been a child, he would have smashed the bones in my hand, he hit with such force.

Some Silkie and other tiny bantam males (and some hens) have spurs capable of opening major arteries and destroying muscle and tendons. The type of injury they cause so often never heals right and remains permanently disfiguring.

Those little drumsticks are massively powerful, if you think about it the average large sized rooster is packing almost equivalent muscle there to compare to the average medium sized human's biceps. Add a spike to that, top it off with a vicious mentality, and that's a recipe for serious damage.

Best wishes.

 

[chickiecorin]

thanks for the awesome response! Ive been watching his actions, and he does a lot of what you described sometimes, sometimes hes golden, and lately hes been a downright bugger. im not home during the day now, hubs is... and wyatt hates him. two days ib a row hes actually chased me down in the yard. adios amigo... hes 6 mos old so hell bee good for eating. and hes a jersey giant so itll be turkey size. im not even a little sad about it... he knocked over my 2 sons right next to their dad. Chicken death wish right there.

 

[chooks4life]

thanks for the awesome response! Ive been watching his actions, and he does a lot of what you described sometimes, sometimes hes golden, and lately hes been a downright bugger. im not home during the day now, hubs is... and wyatt hates him. two days ib a row hes actually chased me down in the yard. adios amigo... hes 6 mos old so hell bee good for eating. and hes a jersey giant so itll be turkey size. im not even a little sad about it... he knocked over my 2 sons right next to their dad. Chicken death wish right there.

Whoa, yeah, smart move getting that one gone ASAP. Definite death wish!

Good on you for prioritizing your kids' safety, it's always a bit of a worry when someone would rather try to teach their kid to defend themselves against the animal, than remove the animal. They can be so fast and agile and hit so hard, the oldest I'd trust a kid to begin to be capable of adequate self defense against a vicious rooster is about 12 years old. Even then, why teach children to manage animals with violence, or subject them to the risk? Not worth it IMO.

Best wishes.

 

[fishbum]

Have her feed him treats. No longer will she be seen as a threat but yet a food dispenser. Kicking him around will only instigate more fights down the road because now your a threat. It's a shame we kill things we don't bother to understand.

 

[chooks4life]

Have her feed him treats. No longer will she be seen as a threat but yet a food dispenser. Kicking him around will only instigate more fights down the road because now your a threat. It's a shame we kill things we don't bother to understand.

Given that the last poster referred to two boys but the thread starter referred to their rooster attacking their daughter, I assume you're responding to the thread starter. That post was posted in early 2008, so by now I assume (and, to be honest, hope) that rooster is dead.

No matter how much even the experts understand chickens, at the end of the day we still lack the ability to change the overwhelming majority of violent roosters, so we manage the risk by killing them.

No amount of understanding them seems to yield retraining results for experts on the whole, never mind newbies. Handfeeding treats does not do it. Assuming that people are killing them because they don't bother to understand them is a mistake, but that's a common enough stance on the issue that many people begin with.

Best wishes.

 

[fishbum]

I guess we should continue killing pit bulls and wolves and such.

 

[chooks4life]

I guess we should continue killing pit bulls and wolves and such.

If a pitbull (or any dog) goes on a mauling spree, or shows intent to maul humans, yes, you kill it. Good ones, you don't need to kill.

Same for roosters. Good ones we don't kill, those trying to kill humans, we kill. As with vicious dogs, hopefully we kill them before they get a chance to do their worst to us.

Same for wolves, though to be fair, only very, very rarely do we ever hear about people being mauled by wolves, and then it's almost always because they're keeping them as pets.

It's a false correlation there. Comparing livestock and pets to wildlife in terms of likelihood of showing aggression to humans regularly would be better done by comparing hippos to roosters, probably.

Best wishes.

 

[fishbum]

On the contrary. What makes most domestic animals attack is the way they are reared. Never met a bad dog that has a good owner.

 

[fishbum]

Never met a mean roo that was handled and loved on as a chick. I've met bad dogs and bad Roos and its always a direct reflection of their handling.

 

[chooks4life]

On the contrary. What makes most domestic animals attack is the way they are reared. Never met a bad dog that has a good owner.

I have met bad dogs with good owners, plenty actually. I've also met plenty of good dogs with terrible owners. Animals can and do make up their own minds about things and inherited behavioral and mental patterns are one of their strongest guiding forces besides basic instinct itself, which it's closely linked to. That's why some breeds are commonly known to be useless for certain lifestyles but great for others, and so forth.

We are far from being the ultimate determinant some think we are.

With livestock, which are mostly nowhere near as intensively interacted with as the average pet, breeding counts for far more than rearing, since unlike dogs they tend to spend far less time with humans and are far less trained, if at all trained, for generation after generation.

Breeding vicious lines is something people have known for thousands of years is the surefire way to beget more vicious animals, particularly in comparatively less intelligent or domesticated species.

The good breed temperaments often cited in breed reviews or standards are basically entirely due to culling against bad temperaments, no special rearing techniques. Equally, no special rearing techniques guarantee good roosters from bad lines, or are proven to reliably retrain bad roosters, or even turn good roosters bad.

Chickens are on average far more instinctive than most pet-bred dogs, in terms of whether they will hold to training rather than heed to inherited behavioral patterns. Obviously working dogs are a different kettle of fish than pet-bred dogs though.

Never met a mean roo that was handled and loved on as a chick. I've met bad dogs and bad Roos and its always a direct reflection of their handling.

On the contrary, I've met many bad dogs and bad roosters that do not in any way derive their attitudes from their owner or their handling, but from their breeding instead.

In my experience you can't change breeding/inherited behavioral traits to a sufficiently relevant extent with any less than a willing animal in possession of a specific type of intelligence, and they're not as common as one would like. General intelligence/worldly smarts is not enough, such a mind only gradually contributes to change of behavior over sufficient generations. They need some decent, unusual degree of cognitive flexibility and self awareness, and ability and willingness to learn to be different, translating into an ability to challenge and change their own inherited patterns of perception and reaction, which is simply not present in many of them.

Most are trainable and adaptable to an individually variable extent, but most are simply not as changeable as they need to be to each represent a good example of the power of the shaping influence of their environment on their nature. They really are mostly nature over nurture, in my experience. The 7-generation rule is a good rule of thumb, it generally does take about 7 generations to breed a trait in or out regardless of environmental influences. Some things happen quicker of course.

Some roosters are no more than human-habituated wild animals running on instinct, basically, especially the dumbest ones since in the absence of intelligence they revert to instinct as their master program; the domestic thoughts in their skulls are few and far between.

Just like feral dogs, don't know if you have any experience with them, but it's much of a muchness. Handling and loving on them is not the be all and end all, does not guarantee a safe animal, despite all those thousands of years of domestication. Enough wildness in their average day, a few short generations of breeding for wild type and mentality, and you lose those domestic traits so quickly. They revert. The same is true for many chickens, they're close to wild, but often in an aberrant expression shaped over many generations of captivity.

When instinct alone is their main program and they have no specific liking or trust in humans, no amount of handling on and loving on them will change it.

Other roosters are aggressive to people because they are confused about whether or not humans are part of their hierarchy, competitors or mates, and others are aggressive because they view humans as threats or as acceptable victims to bully. Over the years I've found a disturbing number of roosters and hens have confused their species with humans and view us as mates or competitors, which I believe is due to the prevalence of AI and other interferences in reproduction causing incorrect imprinting, and it's a direct contributor to much of the aggression we see shown to humans by such chickens.

I've met many roosters that were handled and loved on as chicks, which have turned vicious, even though that's not been your experience.

Spend some more time on this forum and you'll see countless threads about lovely pet roosters that were always handled and loved on and still turned vicious. Many of those people also used to think the early handling and rearing with love would prevent that happening, but now they know better, and unfortunately they found out the hard way in many cases.

Many people on this forum, conversely, swear by never handling them, and they'll tell you in no uncertain terms that handling is what makes them mean. Many say they've never met a mean rooster that wasn't handled and loved on.

So here we have one group that handles them and loves on them and still gets vicious birds, and another group that doesn't do either and still gets nice birds; there's two groups whose experiences/beliefs are in direct conflict with your experiences/beliefs. The facts of the matter are not so simple, is the reason/answer. It's not about who's right or wrong. None of these people, nor you or I, are necessarily wrong here.

I find aggressive family lines tend to turn aggressive no matter whether they're held and loved on or raised unhandled with minimal interaction. You can develop lines whose predominant mentality remains non-aggressive in a non-handling environment, and vice versa, but that's still got nothing much to do with handling or lack thereof determining aggression levels. It's the mentality that determines the reaction to handling, which rarely changes within a single individual's lifetime, not the handling that determines the mentality and therefore reaction to handling.

I handle all mine at least a few times per animal's lifetime, don't have to spend special time on chicks, but don't have aggression issues because I culled it out many years ago. It's that simple and has nothing to do with rearing, everything to do with breeding. I maintain a few controls and tests in order to spot any anti human mentalities, but it's been years since I saw any of those since I culled out the last of that sort. In my experience, as well as most people's it seems, aggression to humans is not a direct reflection of their handling at all.

Obviously that's your experience, and our experiences don't make yours wrong of course, but I think you'll find you're in a minority here. Most people have contradictory experiences it seems. The 'it's the owner's fault' theory just does not ring true in practice. It's far more true on average for dogs than chickens, but still orders of magnitude more distant from being the universal answer than many believe it to be.

Have you heard of sudden rage syndrome in dogs? A few breeds are proven to have it, it's heritable, it's another thing you can't blame on the owner but can blame on the breeder, and absolutely no amount of handling and loving on the animal will change it. Not breeding it is the only solution. Some chickens also have transient but repeating psychological issues like that.

The causes of aggression in roosters are many, but pretty much none of them reliably respond to any attempted alterations other than removal of that animal's behavioral patterns from the genepool. It's very heritable, hence prevention of it being bred on remains by far the main and safest way to ensure non-aggressive roosters.

Best wishes.