Thank you Nat...So tell me, what kind of chickens do you have, and where did all your chicken knowledge come from? And what's you're favorite breed?
I have had chickens off an on for over 30 years. I have had quite a few different breeds, in various numbers and various combinations. Favorite breed? I'm not sure. I especially like chickens with pea combs, clean legs, pretty colored feathers, and who lay brown eggs. Among the breeds that exist (not many have all those traits), I might pick Cornish Bantams as my favorites so far, but I wouldn't want to be stuck with just one kind of chicken.
I first learned about chickens from my mother, who had been raising them since she was little, and she had learned from her father, who learned from his parents, and so on for I don't know how far back. Other than that, I like to read and learn about chickens, and some of the information sticks in my head so I remember it later. Over enough years, it adds up to quite a bit of knowledge.
As regards roosters living in groups with large numbers of hens, Cackle Hatchery has videos of their breeding flocks on some of the breed pages. Example:
https://www.cacklehatchery.com/product/cinnamon-queens/
There is a list of description, breed facts, videos, etc. on one part of the page. Selecting videos will show several options, and one is called "Cinnamon Queen Parent Stock."
This should be a direct link to youtube, for the same video.
In that one, the red birds are the roosters, and the white birds are the hens. (This flock is producing hybrid chicks that can be sexed by color at hatch.) The different colors make it easy to see how many of what are in the building-- lots of roosters and even more hens.
That is going to be a fairly typical setup for a hatchery breeding flock. But when they house chickens that way, of course they cannot tolerate roosters that fight to the death. Dead roosters means none left to breed! But being able to house chickens in large groups makes it much easier and cheaper to produce large numbers of chicks to sell.
Incidentally, when people cite ratios of how many hens per rooster: THIS is the kind of situation those numbers are really meant for. The hatchery wants to feed as few roosters as possible (because roosters don't lay eggs) but they need enough to be sure all the eggs are fertile.
For comparison, here is a Cackle Hatchery video (really just a series of still photos) of Standard Old English Game chickens.
These ones are housed in smaller pens, with several hens and only one rooster per pen. That is a good sign that these roosters would NOT do well together. Having to separate them like that is a nuisance and much more expensive (more pens, more time tending those pens, and so forth), so not many hatcheries offer them, and the price per chick is fairly high. Most breeds sold by hatcheries do not require this kind of separation.
