They are living animals, each with their own individual personality. They don’t come with guarantees. We each have our own unique situation and circumstances. Our management techniques, space, facilities, goals, climate, and neighbors are all different. What works for one person does not necessarily work for others. So much for the legalistic mumbo jumbo fine print.
I always recommend keeping as few roosters as you can and still maintain your goals. Not because you are guaranteed problems with several roosters, but because the chances of having problems go up the more you have. I also don’t believe in magic numbers when it comes to chickens. The magic numbers you often get on this forum come from a specific source, commercial operations that produce hatching eggs and are basically worried about fertility in those specific housing circumstances. Most of us don’t keep our chickens in those circumstances so those magic numbers don’t really apply. That 10 hens to 1 rooster is not a bad ratio to go with. It makes a nice flock. But in a small flock situation, one rooster can usually keep a lot more hens fertile and more roosters than the 10 to 1 does not guarantee problems, either in overmating the hens or in fighting. Still I recommend as few roosters as you can and still meet your goals.
People have been keeping flocks with multiple roosters for thousands of years, usually without big problems. Chickens, hens and roosters, set up a dominance hierarchy, usually called the pecking order. Setting up that pecking order can sometimes be fairly violent or it can go so smoothly you hardly notice. The roosters will have a separate activity. They have to determine who will be the ultimate flock master, the dominant rooster. Usually you will see some confrontation and conflict but seldom is any real damage done. There can be fights to the death however. There are no guarantees.
What usually happens in these conflicts, one chicken decides it is not winning and runs away. There may be some chasing involved by the winner to drive the point home and sometimes there is a rematch, but as long as one runs away, it generally ends peacefully. It is extremely important that they have room to run away and get away, especially if there is chasing involved. To me, having plenty of space so they can run away is the most important criteria.
They usually start sorting the pecking order and dominance issues in the brooder, but as they go through adolescence and mature at different rates, the pecking order can go through a shake-up. You are likely to see fights then, especially between the cockerels.
When they go through adolescence they can have a rough time. Both the cockerels and the pullets have hormones raging and they just don’t know how to act. The cockerels usually mature a bit earlier than the pullets. This is when a lot of young cockerels literally lose their heads. Their hormones are driving the cockerels and the pullets won’t cooperate so the cockerels get forceful. Given time they will both normally eventually mature out of this but it can be fairly violent for a while.
Something you might see, especially during adolescence, is that the pullets or hens lose a lot of feathers, especially on their backs. This can become dangerous because the bare skin can get cut while they are mating. This can come from excessive mating. Those hormones are really driving those adolescent cockerels, but there could be a couple of other things at work. One is that the boys just don’t have a good technique, and to make it worse, the pullets may not do their part exactly right either. Many people think the cockerels are using their spurs to gouge out the feathers and cut the pullets, but these cockerels usually don’t have much in the way of spurs. They do have sharp toenails though and they are trying to hold on and balance on top of a pullet that may not be cooperating really well. If you see this happening you might consider giving them a pedicure. I’ve been known to take a Dremel tool and take the sharp tip off their claws. As long as you don’t go too deep, it’s just like trimming your toenails. But if you go to deep, you can get into the quick.
Another thing that often happens is that it is just one or two hens that are having the bareback problem. The consensus on this forum is that the pullet is being overmated. The rooster has a favorite and is just wearing her out. There actually could be something to this and I have seen pullets and hens that seem anxious to squat for the rooster. But something else that might be going on is that some hens have brittle feathers. They just break up and fall apart. It still comes from mating, but it is not because of bad technique by the rooster or overmating. That hen has a flaw that puts herself at risk.
That bareback problem is not always simple when it shows up. There are several different things that could be causing it.
What normally happens when you have multiple roosters in a flock is that they reach an accommodation on how to cooperate in taking care of the flock. Sometimes they split the flock up into separate harems. I’ve had two roosters that hung out together much more than with the hens. The eggs were still fertile and they knew which one was dominant, but they just hung out together. I’ve had other combinations and permutations happen. They are living animals. You really can’t predict with any certainty what they will wind up doing.
This is totally my opinion based on my observations. Others will have totally different opinions on this stuff. As I said, different things work for different ones of us. Hopefully you can get something useful out of all this.
Good luck!
