Question about Baby Rooster

[JonesLaneChickens]

Okay so I have a quick question. We had a hen hatch out 7 eggs around 2 months ago. I think we have 4 hens and 3 roosters. If I wanted to keep one of the roosters with the hens, would that work?

They share the same father, but different (I think) mothers. I always thought you don't want siblings to breed with each other, but is that the same for chickens? I really love our rooster and his one of his son's is showing the same personality. I want to give him and the hens to my sister but I don't know if the rooster should go or not.

Any advice would be very helpful. Thank you!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Let me respond this way. For thousands of years a standard model for small farms has been to keep replacement roosters and hens from their flock. The replacement male may wind up mating his mother, full sisters or half sisters, or aunts/cousins. The more hens you have so the more random the relationships the longer you can go, but generally they go four or five generations before they bring in a rooster from an unrelated flock to bring back the genetic diversity. One of the things that makes this work is that you have to be pretty ruthless. Do not allow any defective chickens to breed. Try to breed your best specimens.

One potential problem with this is that your flock may have a recessive gene that causes a defect. If the offspring start showing a defect in maybe 25% of the chicks it's a good sign you might want to get rid of all of them and start over. Inbreeding like that is a trick some breeders use to determine if a certain bird has a recessive gene that they don't want in their flock.

If you want to give a male and some females to your sister and she is OK with that, it should be OK.

 

[Mrs. K]

I would mix up what I give to my sister, either older hens and the younger rooster, or the older rooster and the younger hens.

I would advise leaving the young birds to be raised up in the flock for as long as you can pull it off. Eventually they younger roosters will be running the pullets ragged, and at that time, I would divide the flock to give to my sister, culling the extra roosters.

Mrs.K