OlyChickenGuy
Songster
Okay, so I have a brief period in which I'm able to be at a computer. I'm staying next to the local community college, and so I'm in the computer lab right now. No word on my laptop, and now my phone's gone kaput, too, which I will be contacting the phone company and complaining vociferously later today. At any rate, I've taken some notes on what's been talked about here, and am prepared to respond.
How many times should I hold my rooster per day? How should I implement the football hold?
Hold your rooster as many times as possible!! The more often you hold him, the more he's being trained and reinforced! If your time is slim, then try at least twice a day in the morning and evening. I only use the "football hold" as a form of discipline, personally, and when the chicken is behaving well, I hold them so that their head is facing forward. With the head behind you, you are communicating that you want nothing to do with them. No talking to them, no petting them, you're not even LOOKING at them, that's how disgusted you are with their behaviour! However, when facing forward, they can see your face ( and chickens can recognise a face, even a face from another species, for up to three years, and they can regonise up to two hundred different faces! ), and they also are able to understand many of the words we use. Like dogs, they are able to pick up key words and string together what they mean ( think of someone who understands VERY broken English, but certain words stick out, "food", "chick-chick", "No", "Good", etc.... ), and chickens will find a low, calm voice a source of comfort. Chickens "hum" to each other to comfort each other, often heard at night as a sort of "purring" sound, almost like the coo of a dove. Chickens love being scratched or rubbed gently against their ears ( where's a chicken's ear? Right here: [link] ), cheeks, a gentle stroke against the nostril and even right on the top of their beaks, and in gentle circles around the orbit of their eye. Some chickens enjoy having their combs and wattles stroked, or the underside of their beaks, but I've found chickens have the most enjoyment when their ears are scratched, and secondly their cheeks. They will close their eyes and tilt their head when they're very happy, but don't be surprised or alarmed if one eye stays open - it just means they don't entirely trust the situation, but if the eye facing you is closed, that's a good sign - they're trusting YOU, just not that you have control over the situation.
Why is my chicken biting me when I feed him?
He's not being mean! He's just not used to the manners he's supposed to have when eating from your hand. I used to have a boy who was determined to tear the flesh off my hands when I was feeding him, but it wasn't because he was trying to hurt me or trying to get me to drop the food - it was because he didn't know that my hand wasn't food itself! I made sure to have a big, heaping pile of whatever I was feeding him in my hand so he could gobble up many bites before biting me, and when he did bite me, I would give him a sharp poke on his head to tell him not to. Since many of you have read my blog, I'm sure you're familiar with the poke - it's how chickens tell each other they disagree with the other's behaviour, by giving them a single, sharp peck on the head, so the poke mimics that and therefore speaks to them in a language they understand, because they USE that language. After enough times of being poked when he bit my hand, and after enough times of my hand being too tough to reward him with any treats when bitten, he gave up and became a gentle treat-eater. His brother, on the other hand, has the gentlest, daintiest grab of any rooster I've ever had - he will slowly walk up to me, checking out what I have the whole time, then lean forward, open his mouth, very deliberately he will place his beak around the proffered treat, then he will tug very lightly, and if I don't let go when he tugs, he will let go and try again. The main thing here is to understand that eating from one's hand is unnatural to a chicken, so they must go through a learning process of how they're supposed to treat this event.
Is it a good idea / effective to pick up my chicken from their roost at night?
It can be. The first rooster I ever tamed was a wild Welsummer who would attack anyone who went into the yard. When I went into the yard, the first thing I noticed was that he was facing sideways to me, NOT directly forward. When a rooster faces you head-on, he's being dominant and aggressive - when he faces you sideways, he's scared. This rooster was afraid of people, NOT aggressive! I moved towards him, and he ran away. I chased him and chased him, but being my first time chasing a chicken, I had no luck in catching him. I waited until nightfall when he was perched and roosted, then went into the coop, using a flashlight ONLY BRIEFLY to figure out where he was ( chickens can see into the infrared just a tad more than we can, so ANY amount of light is enough to wake them up and make them active - hence why some roosters will crow all night long, because their coop is never fully dark ), then I slipped my hand under his belly, grasped his legs, put one hand over his back and pulled him out. When he flailed and screamed, I help him upside-down until he calmed down, then flipped him right-side up. Being a rooster with no previous human contact he, predictably, freaked out several more times when flipped right-side up, but he was relatively quick to learn ( about twenty minutes of doing this ) that when he was calm, he was normally oriented, but when he freaked out, he went upside-down. Once calm, I held him close, changed my hold on him to something more comfortable for both of us, and began petting him. I brought him in the house where both residents stood slack-jawed at how calm he was being to me.
At this point I STRONGLY SUGGEST that you put any notions of "breaking the good" out of your mind. Chasing your rooster, disturbing him at night, etc., might SEEM quite inconvenient and upsetting to him, and at first it will be, but they more you do it they more he's going to come to understand that NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO TO HIM, he's okay, and in the end that will STRENGTHEN his trust in you. As for chasing and catching a chicken? I always have a hockey stick on hand that I use to "corral" chickens into corners, and I often find that if a chicken has an object in their pen, they will want to go around, around, and around it, so I let them be chased around it several times before putting up a barrier where they are then cornered. Positive reinforcement training with treats and having him come to you can be just as effective, however. My X-fighting cock, Cheswick, was terrified of coming to me of his own free will, and terrified of taking treats out of my hand no matter how long I held it out to him, so I just fed all the rest of my flock while he watched, and chickens ARE capable of learning via observation, so he figured out that the OTHER chickens were being fed just fine when they took stuff out of my hands, so HE should be fine, too. It took him several days, but after watching everyone else get their treats, he eventually approached me and took the treat from my hand, as well. Of course, he tried to take my hand with him, but he soon figured out that didn't work.
Should I get friends for my silkie? Adults or chicks? How can I help her deal with her place in the pecking order?
Maybe - probably not. More often than not, people who try to get "friends" for their lower-end-of-the-social-ladder animals find that they fail miserably in their endeavours, and sometimes their attempts even backfire. You want to work with the problem animal FIRST, and break their problem before introducing ANY new faces to their life, or else you'll just be asking for disaster. The reason the other chickens pick on a neurotic chicken is because they're saying, "Hey! Stop being upset! You're just making things worse!" Unfortunately, neurosis isn't natural in the animal kingdom - it's human made - so the natural way of dealing with ill behaviours doesn't work with these animals, and often just makes them MORE neurotic.
Before we go any further - what does "neurotic" and "neurosis" mean? Literally, it just means "of the brain", or "of the neurons". In practical use, it means "chronic nervousness". A neurotic person is constantly nervous or upset, and they suffer from neurosis. A neurotic animal, likewise, is an animal who is constantly behaving fearfully, so that being said, you are using the word absolutely correctly, and though the extra details are, of course, appreciated, the word "neurotic" fully encompasses your silkie's behaviour perfectly fine.
We, as humans, often times MAKE neurotic animals, not on purpose, but because we don't understand what we're telling them. To pet an animal who is upset, or to give them a treat while they're upset is to tell them that it is OKAY and even GOOD to be upset. As humans, if our children are crying or upset, we cuddle them and talk to them and shower them with good feelings, but as humans we are rational enough to understand that this is not praise for being upset. As animals, they can't figure this out, so when you cuddle and coo to your upset animal, it thinks you're telling it that it is a GOOD THING to be upset. As such, they adopt an upset lifestyle permanently, because they think you want them to be that way!
If you add MORE chickens to this neurotic one, chances are that even the chicks will eventually end up picking on her because of this! AFTER this silkie has calmed down, THEN it would be a good idea to introduce more silkies. It is true that you can't sex silkies at a young age, and if you introduce an adult or few to your silkie once she's rehabbed, she'll likely do very well. Silkies DO actually roost, they just can't fly up to a tall roost, so it would be best to give her a low roost or a "ladder roost". Here, have some roosting silkies, and some looks at ladder roosts which they tend to enjoy: [link] [link]
Azygous has more experience taming neurotic chickens than I do, but I fully agree with her feeding-and-petting methods, as it's what I have used with my own chickens with great success, but her neurotic-to-tame success is much greater than any I have attempted. Even Cheswick, my X-fighter, wasn't nearly as timid as her Darrel. Cheswick was afraid of other chickens, but he was fairly okay with people.
As for modifying the pecking order - it CAN be done, it just requires your constant vigilance and presence, which for most people is quite impossible. Basically what you would do is you would control who eats first, who eats second, correct anyone who tries to get in before that, who gets pet and cuddled first, last, etc. I give NO special treatment to any of my chickens ( except Bowser sleeps in a kennel with me because he is the ONLY rooster I have who is adamantly intent on crowing in the morning, so if I keep him with me I can poke him when he crows and keep him relatively quiet ), but I DO maintain who eats first, second, third, etc. based on who behaves best. Bo eats first ( he's the dainty eater mentioned earlier ) because he is by far my best behaved chicken, then Bowser, who, despite being dominant-minded and head-strong with his crowing, will let me hold him on his back, play with his feet, open his mouth and stick my finger inside of it, etc., and so on and so forth until I get to the bottom of the pecking order, AKA, the worst behaved. Those lower on the pecking order WILL be able to understand how the pecking order works, and they WILL be able to see those higher than them as role models, and they WILL strive to be more like the top of the pecking order! It's not a fool-proof system since you still need to help the lower ones figure out how to be better, but it will help reinforce what you want in your flock.
Good luck in all of your endeavours, and please carry on. I am intrigued to find out where this thread will go, and how your feathered friends will fare with your treatment.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and how to implement chicks to silkies! Well, this method will work with just about any hen, but it's almost a guarantee with silkies and cochins since they're both so inclined to be mothers. Give them FAKE EGGS to sit on when they're sitting, allow them to sit for three weeks, then SWITCH OUT the fake eggs with chicks. They'll almost certainly be tricked into thinking that their eggs hatched, and that these are their babies. Simply introducing chicks when a hen who ISN'T broody can be disasterous and even fatal for the chicks, because the instinct to be a mother doesn't just click on when they see babies ( though SOMETIMES a hen will accept chicks just because they're there, it's no guarantee ). If you allow them their period of being broody, their hormones will be just right for accepting chicks, and they'll ALREADY be in the mindset to take them on, therefore bypassing any adjustment period of trying to get the hen to accept the babies.
How many times should I hold my rooster per day? How should I implement the football hold?
Hold your rooster as many times as possible!! The more often you hold him, the more he's being trained and reinforced! If your time is slim, then try at least twice a day in the morning and evening. I only use the "football hold" as a form of discipline, personally, and when the chicken is behaving well, I hold them so that their head is facing forward. With the head behind you, you are communicating that you want nothing to do with them. No talking to them, no petting them, you're not even LOOKING at them, that's how disgusted you are with their behaviour! However, when facing forward, they can see your face ( and chickens can recognise a face, even a face from another species, for up to three years, and they can regonise up to two hundred different faces! ), and they also are able to understand many of the words we use. Like dogs, they are able to pick up key words and string together what they mean ( think of someone who understands VERY broken English, but certain words stick out, "food", "chick-chick", "No", "Good", etc.... ), and chickens will find a low, calm voice a source of comfort. Chickens "hum" to each other to comfort each other, often heard at night as a sort of "purring" sound, almost like the coo of a dove. Chickens love being scratched or rubbed gently against their ears ( where's a chicken's ear? Right here: [link] ), cheeks, a gentle stroke against the nostril and even right on the top of their beaks, and in gentle circles around the orbit of their eye. Some chickens enjoy having their combs and wattles stroked, or the underside of their beaks, but I've found chickens have the most enjoyment when their ears are scratched, and secondly their cheeks. They will close their eyes and tilt their head when they're very happy, but don't be surprised or alarmed if one eye stays open - it just means they don't entirely trust the situation, but if the eye facing you is closed, that's a good sign - they're trusting YOU, just not that you have control over the situation.
Why is my chicken biting me when I feed him?
He's not being mean! He's just not used to the manners he's supposed to have when eating from your hand. I used to have a boy who was determined to tear the flesh off my hands when I was feeding him, but it wasn't because he was trying to hurt me or trying to get me to drop the food - it was because he didn't know that my hand wasn't food itself! I made sure to have a big, heaping pile of whatever I was feeding him in my hand so he could gobble up many bites before biting me, and when he did bite me, I would give him a sharp poke on his head to tell him not to. Since many of you have read my blog, I'm sure you're familiar with the poke - it's how chickens tell each other they disagree with the other's behaviour, by giving them a single, sharp peck on the head, so the poke mimics that and therefore speaks to them in a language they understand, because they USE that language. After enough times of being poked when he bit my hand, and after enough times of my hand being too tough to reward him with any treats when bitten, he gave up and became a gentle treat-eater. His brother, on the other hand, has the gentlest, daintiest grab of any rooster I've ever had - he will slowly walk up to me, checking out what I have the whole time, then lean forward, open his mouth, very deliberately he will place his beak around the proffered treat, then he will tug very lightly, and if I don't let go when he tugs, he will let go and try again. The main thing here is to understand that eating from one's hand is unnatural to a chicken, so they must go through a learning process of how they're supposed to treat this event.
Is it a good idea / effective to pick up my chicken from their roost at night?
It can be. The first rooster I ever tamed was a wild Welsummer who would attack anyone who went into the yard. When I went into the yard, the first thing I noticed was that he was facing sideways to me, NOT directly forward. When a rooster faces you head-on, he's being dominant and aggressive - when he faces you sideways, he's scared. This rooster was afraid of people, NOT aggressive! I moved towards him, and he ran away. I chased him and chased him, but being my first time chasing a chicken, I had no luck in catching him. I waited until nightfall when he was perched and roosted, then went into the coop, using a flashlight ONLY BRIEFLY to figure out where he was ( chickens can see into the infrared just a tad more than we can, so ANY amount of light is enough to wake them up and make them active - hence why some roosters will crow all night long, because their coop is never fully dark ), then I slipped my hand under his belly, grasped his legs, put one hand over his back and pulled him out. When he flailed and screamed, I help him upside-down until he calmed down, then flipped him right-side up. Being a rooster with no previous human contact he, predictably, freaked out several more times when flipped right-side up, but he was relatively quick to learn ( about twenty minutes of doing this ) that when he was calm, he was normally oriented, but when he freaked out, he went upside-down. Once calm, I held him close, changed my hold on him to something more comfortable for both of us, and began petting him. I brought him in the house where both residents stood slack-jawed at how calm he was being to me.
At this point I STRONGLY SUGGEST that you put any notions of "breaking the good" out of your mind. Chasing your rooster, disturbing him at night, etc., might SEEM quite inconvenient and upsetting to him, and at first it will be, but they more you do it they more he's going to come to understand that NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO TO HIM, he's okay, and in the end that will STRENGTHEN his trust in you. As for chasing and catching a chicken? I always have a hockey stick on hand that I use to "corral" chickens into corners, and I often find that if a chicken has an object in their pen, they will want to go around, around, and around it, so I let them be chased around it several times before putting up a barrier where they are then cornered. Positive reinforcement training with treats and having him come to you can be just as effective, however. My X-fighting cock, Cheswick, was terrified of coming to me of his own free will, and terrified of taking treats out of my hand no matter how long I held it out to him, so I just fed all the rest of my flock while he watched, and chickens ARE capable of learning via observation, so he figured out that the OTHER chickens were being fed just fine when they took stuff out of my hands, so HE should be fine, too. It took him several days, but after watching everyone else get their treats, he eventually approached me and took the treat from my hand, as well. Of course, he tried to take my hand with him, but he soon figured out that didn't work.
Should I get friends for my silkie? Adults or chicks? How can I help her deal with her place in the pecking order?
Maybe - probably not. More often than not, people who try to get "friends" for their lower-end-of-the-social-ladder animals find that they fail miserably in their endeavours, and sometimes their attempts even backfire. You want to work with the problem animal FIRST, and break their problem before introducing ANY new faces to their life, or else you'll just be asking for disaster. The reason the other chickens pick on a neurotic chicken is because they're saying, "Hey! Stop being upset! You're just making things worse!" Unfortunately, neurosis isn't natural in the animal kingdom - it's human made - so the natural way of dealing with ill behaviours doesn't work with these animals, and often just makes them MORE neurotic.
Before we go any further - what does "neurotic" and "neurosis" mean? Literally, it just means "of the brain", or "of the neurons". In practical use, it means "chronic nervousness". A neurotic person is constantly nervous or upset, and they suffer from neurosis. A neurotic animal, likewise, is an animal who is constantly behaving fearfully, so that being said, you are using the word absolutely correctly, and though the extra details are, of course, appreciated, the word "neurotic" fully encompasses your silkie's behaviour perfectly fine.
We, as humans, often times MAKE neurotic animals, not on purpose, but because we don't understand what we're telling them. To pet an animal who is upset, or to give them a treat while they're upset is to tell them that it is OKAY and even GOOD to be upset. As humans, if our children are crying or upset, we cuddle them and talk to them and shower them with good feelings, but as humans we are rational enough to understand that this is not praise for being upset. As animals, they can't figure this out, so when you cuddle and coo to your upset animal, it thinks you're telling it that it is a GOOD THING to be upset. As such, they adopt an upset lifestyle permanently, because they think you want them to be that way!
If you add MORE chickens to this neurotic one, chances are that even the chicks will eventually end up picking on her because of this! AFTER this silkie has calmed down, THEN it would be a good idea to introduce more silkies. It is true that you can't sex silkies at a young age, and if you introduce an adult or few to your silkie once she's rehabbed, she'll likely do very well. Silkies DO actually roost, they just can't fly up to a tall roost, so it would be best to give her a low roost or a "ladder roost". Here, have some roosting silkies, and some looks at ladder roosts which they tend to enjoy: [link] [link]
Azygous has more experience taming neurotic chickens than I do, but I fully agree with her feeding-and-petting methods, as it's what I have used with my own chickens with great success, but her neurotic-to-tame success is much greater than any I have attempted. Even Cheswick, my X-fighter, wasn't nearly as timid as her Darrel. Cheswick was afraid of other chickens, but he was fairly okay with people.
As for modifying the pecking order - it CAN be done, it just requires your constant vigilance and presence, which for most people is quite impossible. Basically what you would do is you would control who eats first, who eats second, correct anyone who tries to get in before that, who gets pet and cuddled first, last, etc. I give NO special treatment to any of my chickens ( except Bowser sleeps in a kennel with me because he is the ONLY rooster I have who is adamantly intent on crowing in the morning, so if I keep him with me I can poke him when he crows and keep him relatively quiet ), but I DO maintain who eats first, second, third, etc. based on who behaves best. Bo eats first ( he's the dainty eater mentioned earlier ) because he is by far my best behaved chicken, then Bowser, who, despite being dominant-minded and head-strong with his crowing, will let me hold him on his back, play with his feet, open his mouth and stick my finger inside of it, etc., and so on and so forth until I get to the bottom of the pecking order, AKA, the worst behaved. Those lower on the pecking order WILL be able to understand how the pecking order works, and they WILL be able to see those higher than them as role models, and they WILL strive to be more like the top of the pecking order! It's not a fool-proof system since you still need to help the lower ones figure out how to be better, but it will help reinforce what you want in your flock.
Good luck in all of your endeavours, and please carry on. I am intrigued to find out where this thread will go, and how your feathered friends will fare with your treatment.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and how to implement chicks to silkies! Well, this method will work with just about any hen, but it's almost a guarantee with silkies and cochins since they're both so inclined to be mothers. Give them FAKE EGGS to sit on when they're sitting, allow them to sit for three weeks, then SWITCH OUT the fake eggs with chicks. They'll almost certainly be tricked into thinking that their eggs hatched, and that these are their babies. Simply introducing chicks when a hen who ISN'T broody can be disasterous and even fatal for the chicks, because the instinct to be a mother doesn't just click on when they see babies ( though SOMETIMES a hen will accept chicks just because they're there, it's no guarantee ). If you allow them their period of being broody, their hormones will be just right for accepting chicks, and they'll ALREADY be in the mindset to take them on, therefore bypassing any adjustment period of trying to get the hen to accept the babies.
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