To everyone who's taken time to post pics of their good roos & tell their stories, thank you. They are so varied in breed as to provide a beautiful feathered collage, like a patchwork quilt.
I've had 2 roos in my flock & they were both fantastic, but not to one another. I had the lead roo, a super handsome Plymouth Barred Rock (Rocket Man), whom we hand raised thinking that he was a pullet (surprise!!) & a majestic White Leghorn (Mr Peanut) who was given to us by a friend who'd gotten a roo in his batch of chicks & wasn't allowed to have a roo in his area.
While Rocket Man preferred to be a hands off, arms length kind of fellow, he was super gentle with and attentive to his ladies. It was clear that they loved him, too (with the exception of the 2 oldest girls who wanted nothing to do with him). If it got to be lights out & he'd tucked in the ladies but not gotten up to the roost before lights out, he'd trill softly & brush against my legs, as if asking me to help him get up to bed. I was always able to tell him that I was going to put my hands under his feet, then slowly lift my handsome rooster statue onto the roost next to his favorite hen. At that point, I was able to pet him, tell him nice things & tuck him in, too.
My little White Leghorn was billed as a loud, aggressive bully. Imagine my surprise to find that he was a complete Mama's Boy! He rode quietly in a box on my lap the whole way to his new home. He was so quiet in fact, that I was afraid that the shock of catching & popping him into a dark box had killed him, despite us both talking calmly & softly to him. When I cracked the flap lid just a wee bit to check, there he was, lying on the towel, just looking up at me. I could tell that the poor creature was scared (who wouldn't be?) so I told him that I was going to reach in to touch him & be sure that he was alright. Man, he was tense like a taught wire! And then he just relaxed as I started petting him. Here began the love story of Chicken Mom & my feathered Mama's Boy Mr Peanut. When we got home, we prepared his box in the basement & his daytime run adjacent to the main run. He was young enough to not have fully feathered & I knew that he couldn't just be popped into the population without some serious work (& some quarantine). He went from the box on my lap to the grass (& had some water) and when it was time to round him up, he jumped onto my shoulder. We walked to the porch & he had his water, dinner & our chicken cuddle time, which became our nightly ritual. He didn't care that he'd gotten older & bigger in the pic I've attached. He just loved perching on me for a nightly cuddle. If I was turning over chicken yard dirt, he'd jump on my back, walk up to my shoulder & plop himself down, thereby announcing that I was done doing whatever else I thought I was doing at that moment, lol. Even after he was introduced into the coop, he would still walk from the perch onto my lap. And if I bent over in the coop, he'd fly across to land in my back, walk up to my shoulder & snuggle.
So while I agree with the hands off arms length method, sometimes someone else has other ideas. He had some hormone induced glazed eyes where he'wanna fight, for just a moment, but by not engaging him (and not running...cause Mama's Boy or not, that's never gonna happen) he snapped back to his sweet self & we worked thru his teenage angst together. He was truly a marvelous creature, they both were.
I swear, if we ever win the lottery, we are going to have a chicken sanctuary with a b'zillion roos, hens & tons of acres to live on. And the eggs will be free to anyone. We'll predator proof it (as best one can) & have KIND flock supervisors help with them & watch over them. And we will live on the property, because really, when you define your idea of paradise, aren't there tons of happy, healthy chickens there?
