Breeding for PERSONALITY. AKA Hello SWEET ROO!

[LindaB220]

8 X 12 with 5 roosts that go from wall to wall for perching, roosting or just plain to get away from other roosters. There is a feeder on the end of every roost and a waterer on the other end. Plenty of places to eat and drink. All of my roosters were raised like this and when I put a mature rooster in the pen there is a little sparring, but they lose interest pretty quickly. There may be as many as 20 roosters at any given time. I raise dual purpose chickens, leghorns and Araucanas. I have never tried a game type rooster in this mix. The ages range between 2 months and my oldest rooster, 5 years. I simply do not have time or resources to cage that many roosters. Or the time to care for them. My hens enjoy life without roosters. I have breeding pens that I use when collecting eggs for hatching. I put pullets in with the laying hens when they are out of their brooders and fully feathered. I have very few problems with any pecking order problems.

Well, that's good. My laying coop is 12 x 12 and the other is 8 x 12. I have 4 roosts on the second one. Right now I have one rooster that is immature but he's 7 mo old. I'm getting his daddy next week. About 18 mo old. They were together until 3 mo ago. How much trouble will I be in if I tried to put the dad into the coop with 7 pullets and the immature rooster. Or should I just move the young one? I have a 3 x 12' growout pen right next to the coop. Should I just move him into it? I shouldn't have anymore trouble until new hatches at the first of the year. Unfortunately I don't have a run yet. Just the coops.

 

[enola]

I would not advise putting an immature rooster and a mature rooster together with hens. If they have been separated for 3 months they are strangers.

 

[LindaB220]

I would not advise putting an immature rooster and a mature rooster together with hens. If they have been separated for 3 months they are strangers.

That's what I figured. I'll move the Jr one. Then put the new one with the pullets. They are all 7-8 months old but none are laying. I'm assuming due to no lights in the coop.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

While I agree that owners need to be aware of what 'makes them tick' as you say, you can have both a protective roo and one that won't attack you. It is all about being picky. I am with enola, the second a roo shows real aggression, as in flogging, he is gone. I dont' care if I have a hen squaking up a bloody murder in my hands. A good roo will get nervous when you handle the birds but he should not attack.....

This is what I expect

We both expect the same thing, but I prefer to cull as few man (or woman) fighting roosters as possible. If you are breeding to a standard you will find that there are already enough reasons to
cull a rooster without adding behavior to the list.

I prefer not to butcher anymore roosters than is absolutely necessary. However I also absolutely loath having to enter a coop or brood pen and keeping the feed bucket between me and the rooster just to give him a moving target to shoot at instead of sniping at my shins. There is an old saw that says, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I therefor would rather prevent problems that act to solve them after the fact.

Some claim that the mother hen has a greater influence on the DNA inherited by a cockerel than the rooster imparts to his sons. Likewise the brood rooster influences his daughters genetics more than the hen does. At any rate I doubt that there is going to be any appreciative improvement in the personality of a rooster unless the male and the female line both are relentlessly culled to the same degree. So in a mixed flock of chickens, how much improvement can you attribute to selectively culling the male line and how much improvement is pure blind luck and therefor will not be repeated or passed on to the next generation?

This is not written to criticize or to argue but to urge people to think about their every action as their actions relate to their chickens.

 

[Pyxis]

I also breed for temperament in my roosters. No nasty ones are allowed to stay. I have a friend that will take them for her rooster bachelor pen and then turn them into soup when they get big enough. I only allow the nice ones to stay, and because of that, only the nice ones get to breed. Easy as that for me. However, I do want to add that I think at least some of it is how they're raised. My two original roosters, a buff orp I still have, and a mostly RIR mix who passed away last winter, I raised myself from chicks. Both were the sweetest things, and even climbed into my lap to be pet. Now, the RIR mix would prefer you didn't pick him up, but otherwise he loved humans. Was never aggressive and never once showed aggressive behavior. His son, however, I let go as a day old to my friend who is not as hands on raising her birds as I am. He was crossed with sweet little EE hen who is just a darling. There was no aggressiveness ever shown from either parent. That rooster started biting and flogging my friend the second hormones kicked in. I think had he been raised a little different, he wouldn't have been like that. So while genetics play a major role, I think the way a rooster is raised plays a role too.

 

[LindaB220]

I also breed for temperament in my roosters. No nasty ones are allowed to stay. I have a friend that will take them for her rooster bachelor pen and then turn them into soup when they get big enough. I only allow the nice ones to stay, and because of that, only the nice ones get to breed. Easy as that for me. However, I do want to add that I think at least some of it is how they're raised. My two original roosters, a buff orp I still have, and a mostly RIR mix who passed away last winter, I raised myself from chicks. Both were the sweetest things, and even climbed into my lap to be pet. Now, the RIR mix would prefer you didn't pick him up, but otherwise he loved humans. Was never aggressive and never once showed aggressive behavior. His son, however, I let go as a day old to my friend who is not as hands on raising her birds as I am. He was crossed with sweet little EE hen who is just a darling. There was no aggressiveness ever shown from either parent. That rooster started biting and flogging my friend the second hormones kicked in. I think had he been raised a little different, he wouldn't have been like that. So while genetics play a major role, I think the way a rooster is raised plays a role too.

One thing I was determined to do was to get rid of all the hatchery stock I bought when I first got into chickens. I have found that breeder eggs hatched here seems to do the trick for me. All have been quite tame. And I'm only going to raise the docile type of birds. White Plymouth rocks, and Basques. Later Lavender Australorps.

 

[CrazyTalk]

At any rate I doubt that there is going to be any appreciative improvement in the personality of a rooster unless the male and the female line both are relentlessly culled to the same degree. So in a mixed flock of chickens, how much improvement can you attribute to selectively culling the male line and how much improvement is pure blind luck and therefor will not be repeated or passed on to the next generation?

If you're culling aggressive cockerels, you are culling both the male and female lines - less aggressive hen lines will have more of their offspring live - more aggressive hen lines will have more cockerels culled. You don't have to directly cull hens to be selecting against aggressive hen lines - because all of your breeding roosters will be from your less aggressive hen lines.

It may take a couple more generations, but it'll work just fine.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

If you're culling aggressive cockerels, you are culling both the male and female lines - ....You don't have to directly cull hens to be selecting against aggressive hen lines - because all of your breeding roosters will be from your less aggressive hen lines.

It may take a couple more generations, but it'll work just fine.

At the beginning of the 20th Century the average milk yield of an American dairy cow was somewhere on the order of 6 pounds per day. Today the average yield per milk cow is a 100 pounds per day or better.

I know that dairy cow husbandry has improved greatly in the last 114 years, but this staggering increase in milk wasn't achieved with the use of Bovine rDNA but by selective breeding.
I can assure you that the Universities where the selective breeding experiments occurred didn't milk their bulls to get this kind of increase but they selected from both the male and female lines and then they bred, in-bred, in-bred some more and then they tested and they culled, Culled, CUlled, CULled, CULLed, CULLEd, and then CULLED some more to get to where the dairy business is today production wise.

Conversely, at the end of the 19th Century many farmers still allowed their milk cows to free range like some chicken keepers think that their chickens do to day. Any bull could and did mate with these cows. However I am sure that dairy farmers for the last 8,000 years have been saving replacement heifers out of their best producing cows but milk production in 1899 was still stuck where it was ci. 6,000BCE.

Again, I am not trying to argue but to point out to the new chicken keeper what should be obvious if we will all only think about it.

 

[CrazyTalk]

I may just be misunderstanding, but up till, say 1850, we didn't even know that genetic traits were heritable - Most of the advances in the last century are largely dependent on us understanding what is going on - a backyard chicken breeder today is way ahead of a cattle breeder from 200 years ago, let alone 2000 - so the presumption that a farmer was consciously selecting for traits is a large assumption - and isn't particularly likely.

All of this works better with good record keeping, heavier culling, etc, but any sort of conscious, consistent selection for specific traits is going to very quickly (as in a couple generations) alter the prevalence of that trait in the population.

 

[TaraBellaBirds]

so the presumption that a farmer was consciously selecting for traits is a large assumption - and isn't particularly likely.

It may be that Science only recently proved and was able to isolate the genes for certain traits, but humans have been actively breeding traits into animals for 1,000's of years. We can't underestimate what out ancestors understood. Look at the wolf and the modern dog. Only by carefully choosing which to breed and which not to breed were we able to have the diversity that we have today.