I understand your feelings about dealing with your cockerel - I am a vet tech, and a few years ago ended up with 3 cockerels out of 6 chicks I raised - I can’t keep them where I’m at and it was difficult for me to try to wrap my head around culling a perfectly healthy living thing because of its sex. As soon as I felt confident I had cockerels (two started trying to crow and one just screamed “BOY” with his red comb and wattles), I started asking around and placed some ads on Craigslist. I had to accept the fact that they would likely go someplace where they’d be someone’s dinner (not sure if bantams suffer the same fate, mine were standard size). Happily for me and my boys, my 7 year old son found a home for two of my guys, who were an uncommon breed, with a friend of his bus driver, and my last cockerel, a Jersey Giant, got picked up by someone who drove two states over to get him after answering my ad on Craigslist - they had just lost their JG roo and were missing him terribly. Had they gone to “eating“ homes, I would have been sad, but at the end of the day, I eat chicken so I don’t feel I can be too hypocritical about it, and they’d have been far more likely to have a humane death than if I tried to do it myself with no experience.
