Dandichook
Songster
Hello all!
We have some 6 week old (turning 7 weeks this Friday) Coturnix quail that we are in the beginning stages of selecting our breeding group from.
We had been seeing some aggression in our male pen, which we expected to some degree, and have been managing and tracking (determining who the aggressor(s) is/are and culling the worst offenders progressively) with a reasonable level of success.
We do understand that with quails there will be some aggression, but our intent is to select heavily against it, as we would eventually like a peaceful flock. Hence, we are doing some testing and observation. As part of that, we have a 12 square foot cage set up with 6 hens in it (all feather sexable) and one (also feather sexable) male. I don't think space is an issue at a little under 2sft per bird.
One hen appears to be bullying the others. She's chasing the others around and indiscriminately pecking at others, causing them to flee. It doesn't appear to be resource-guarding, but instead rushing across the cage to attack birds not even close to her. She's even successfully beating up the male and a few significantly larger females.
I didn't expect to see this level of aggression in females. Are my expectations just unreasonable? Or is she, as I suspect, an unusually aggressive female in need of culling? I have plenty other girls to choose from in a different pen, and don't want to fuss around with mean birds. Freezer camp is open for business to jerks in our household, but if this is just normal adult behavior and I can't expect better, I'd rather wait until they're older (read: bigger) before beginning to cull females.
Any advice is welcome!!
We have some 6 week old (turning 7 weeks this Friday) Coturnix quail that we are in the beginning stages of selecting our breeding group from.
We had been seeing some aggression in our male pen, which we expected to some degree, and have been managing and tracking (determining who the aggressor(s) is/are and culling the worst offenders progressively) with a reasonable level of success.
We do understand that with quails there will be some aggression, but our intent is to select heavily against it, as we would eventually like a peaceful flock. Hence, we are doing some testing and observation. As part of that, we have a 12 square foot cage set up with 6 hens in it (all feather sexable) and one (also feather sexable) male. I don't think space is an issue at a little under 2sft per bird.
One hen appears to be bullying the others. She's chasing the others around and indiscriminately pecking at others, causing them to flee. It doesn't appear to be resource-guarding, but instead rushing across the cage to attack birds not even close to her. She's even successfully beating up the male and a few significantly larger females.
I didn't expect to see this level of aggression in females. Are my expectations just unreasonable? Or is she, as I suspect, an unusually aggressive female in need of culling? I have plenty other girls to choose from in a different pen, and don't want to fuss around with mean birds. Freezer camp is open for business to jerks in our household, but if this is just normal adult behavior and I can't expect better, I'd rather wait until they're older (read: bigger) before beginning to cull females.
Any advice is welcome!!
