kill a mean rooster = you just became the mean one.
I love roosters!
I agree with the everyone about the roosters. I apologize for this being so long. Given the thread title I thought I would share this experience with others to help with their rooster experiences.
I started out a year and a few months ago on my own chicken raising adventure by chance actually. I always wanted chickens been around them most of my life. My previous landlord had 16 acres he wanted to make self-sufficient. He started with chickens. He didn't know the first thing about how to do it and asked for my help knowing I had some knowledge in that department. He said he would pay for everything if I raised them. Eventually he realized how expensive feed was for so many even supplementing with free-ranging. In the end I was the one doing it all. Which is fine because I learned a great deal I might not have had the chance to learn on my own.
We had the coops that his grandfather had built still on the property. I started getting them ready and doing repairs. Here is where the fun started...
He went on Ideal Poultry and they were out of females. So he ordered 25 mixed. Somehow he thought he was getting a straight run. Well they came in and we had 25 Roosters of 5 different breeds. Four months into that I had to start picking out who had to go because when they were 1 month old he ordered 50 heavy laying hens.
Then my mother gave me 2 roosters she couldn't deal with anymore. One had left a big scar on her leg which needed stitches. Well I started to make some headway with the mean ones and we were getting on a friendly biases, I thought. The Cooper Maran went after me one morning and now I bare my own scar on my hand from that. In fact all the scars on my hands are from roosters. I didn't need stitches. We were to far from a hospital for me to worry about it anyway. You learn a lot about first aid when you live so far from medical attention. Needless to say I was livid with this rooster. He was the first one to go in the freezer. The other followed about a month later.
Then I got 6 hens and a Barred Rock rooster and a Perkins duck from my mother as she couldn't keep up with the flock because her work schedule went into overdrive. I loved the Barred Rock rooster, Kellogg. He is one of the best roosters I have ever had. He protected the girls, was nice to them, and kept the confused Perkins away from them. The duck thought he was a rooster for some reason. I recently had to cull Kellogg from my flock because the 4 hens I kept out of my 75 chickens were scared of him. They were not raised together. Now I have kept 3 of his children, 3 and half weeks old, and I hope to have one rooster out of him and his ladies. I hope it will have the same temperament his father did because Kellogg was dear to me.
The only time he ever came after me was a day after we moved houses. He was startled and confused in the new surroundings. However in that state he got me right under my eye as I went to pick him up and put him in the coop with the girls for the night. And he did not like the color red for some reason. Anyone wearing red would spook him severely, but you put a different color on and you could walk around him just fine.
Now if someone is to say as that person did that culling a mean rooster is not right, I am sorry. I am glad you seem to have had good tempered roosters but the majority of rooster are not good tempered. They are built to be dominant, protect, and breed to continue their species. This means they must be aggressive in the animal world to survive. How they carry that duty depends upon each individual rooster and other factors.
I have been spurred, bloodied, scared, and played rooster chase around pastures and chicken yards because of roosters. They have chased my hens through 2 different pasture as I chased them to try and save the hen. It is not fun chasing chickens through and over barbed wire fence and into the next property over and around their cattle.
Roosters can be nice but if they are not they have to go somewhere all be it the freezer or to someone who might have better luck with them.
