Asil Chickens!

[fowlafoot]

Training chickens.... hmm, I know we all love our chickens and the urge to anthropormorphise them is great, and has been helped along with lots of books and cartoons portraying animals as people too, however lets all keep in mind that chickens are chickens and people are people. Chickens can be conditioned, basic Pavlov theory, if I step out my door right now and cluck my yard flock will come running as fast as possible because they have been conditioned to associate my terrible reproduction of their call to food with table scraps. That does not mean I have trained them, and the fact that they also have associated the door opening with table scraps and tend to come running any time I go out does not mean that they love me... it means that they have through experience and reinforcement come to associate food with the door opening and me clucking to them. There is no means of reinforcement available to condition or train a rooster not to run or to fight... that is instinct at play.
Another common myth I haven't seen addressed is the agression towards people. In my experience (I've been breeding American and Oriental games for years and have owned 1000s of them from hatch to natural death and never fought them) game breeds are rarely agressive towards people. The methods people use to try to tame or calm a rooster who is agressive towards people are basic conditioning and reinforcement, once again not training. The agression that a game breed displays has a purpose, survival of the fittest and is intended to weed out sick, weak or less than excellent breeders from the gene pool.

 

[Icarus Crows]

Did I just miss something with this exchange. wclawrence, "You just feel like Icarus Crows..." what?

 

[cgmccary]

Fowlafoot; interesting that the Game breeds are rarely aggressive toward people. Recently, I purchased some cages from a young man here in Alabama who was getting rid of his Game Roosters & operation (he had great cages!). While he was helping me load the cages on my truck, I noticed his arms and hands were really cut up bad & asked him what had happened. He said his Roosters had done that to him & that they were very aggressive & real protective of their pens. This was the first time I'd heard of such aggression from Game Roosters-- maybe it was just the bloodline this fella raised-- to be that way toward people.

My Buckeye males are aggressive toward me, & I have tried everything to stop it. I must be doing something wrong (or it must have something to do with my set-up) because other folks I've sold birds to report that theirs show no aggression toward them.

So, if any of you have "training tips" or "conditioning and reinforcment" (I won't care what you call it-- I thought part of training was conditioning and reinforcement) to stop the aggression toward me from my Cockerels & Roosters, then I'm all ears. Incidentally, I've tried both negative and positive reinforcement to no avail. {Mine, in no way, cut up my hands & arms like the young man's cocks did him-- I'd have to kill 'em if they were that bad-- I couldn't tolerate that much aggression. My males will shadow me and if I turn my back, they come flying at me jumping me-- my hands, face, arms are nowhere close.}

 

[prariechiken]

Selective breeding is your only option. If the gentleman had games that would attack him, then he wasn't selectively breeding away from it. Aggression towards people can be found in any breed, just ask some of your RIR owners. The problem you encounter with many "pure" breed birds is that look and conformation are selected before temperament. Me, no matter what breed of bird, actively selects away from "manfighters". Once they start the only cure is usually the ax. Some of it can be caused by how they are raised. If they are hand raised and associate themselves with people before chickens, then they may see you as an equal that needs to be put in their place in the pecking order. Other than more handling and tameing, there is no way to "train" a chicken to do much of anything.... its hard to make a chicken be something other than a chicken... might want to check here to see if this helps too..... good luck friend...

 

[cgmccary]

Thanks Prariechken!-- that's a great site! The Gamers really know their birds!

 

[Emzyyy]

My neighbor has a couple of 'em. He has a lot of oriental breeds.

 

[Poohbear]

I raise Oriental fowl. They are much more gentle than American Gamefowl. Although the Americans are beautiful, I prefer my Orientals for their own beauty. I'm like Will Rodgers and people. I never met a chicken I didn't like. I'd have one of EVERYTHING if I could feed them!

 

[prariechiken]

Quote:
Wouldn't we all....

 

[wclawrence]

Icarus Crows. I was saying I feel like you do about the blurred lines nowadays between Fact and Opinion. What you said about that was spot on.

Another thought.
Anyone who has game chickens that are man-fighters, and they keep them very long, is crippled too high for crutches. I used to have a bunch of them. Fought them too. A lot. Not ashamed of it either.
Mine were tame like a dog. and still to this day if a rooster decides to kill me, well, I win. He loses.
Manfighters will loose a match for you, quickly too. When they are in the pit and wheel around to smack you, the opposing rooster will turn him into a colander.

Another thought.
If game chickens are not selectively bred for gameness, and allowed to run free on the yard, they will eventually loose a lot of their gameness.
Because what happens is this. You raise a brood or five, the birds grow up. When the roosters get old enough to fight, the best ones kill each other, the worst one(s) live to breed because they were not killed in a fight. So they naturally revert back to wild type (which is aggressive and territorial but not pit-game)

 

[hinkjc]

2. No Cock fighting posts, period!

This discussion keeps going back to fighting discussions, which is not tolerated on the forum. If you could have kept with the breed discussion, it would have stayed open.