I hatch and raise my dual purpose chicks, cockerels and pullets, with the flock. Occasionally I’ll lock the cockerels into a special grow-out pen but normally they all stay with the main flock, mature rooster and hens, until I butcher them. I try to butcher around 5 months of age. They are too old to fry or grill but they have a lot of meat on them. You need to adjust your cooking methods to the age of the birds.
Usually why I lock the cockerels up is that I want hatching eggs fertilized by a certain rooster, not because the cockerels are bothering the hens or pullets too much. So I lock the cockerels up when they start getting sexually active. But I’ve only done that three times that I can remember. The rest of the time I let them roam with the entire flock.
Yes, those cockerels fight among themselves. So what? That’s what they do. In all the years I’ve been doing this I’ve had one cockerel kill another cockerel. Only one. I had eighteen cockerels (no pullets) I was raising with the main flock to determine which I wanted to be my next flock master. One took an intense dislike to another and killed him. Since I’d never had one kill another I didn’t worry too much about it. I should have. But after he killed the one, the remaining 17 cockerels got along OK until I eliminated them down to one.
I’ve never had a mature rooster kill a cockerel. Often when the cockerels bother the mature hens the hens run to the mature rooster and he takes care of Junior, but that is almost always running and chasing, not fighting to the death. I practically always eat the cockerels before they mature enough to stand up to the mature rooster. One the occasions I’m keeping one cockerel to take over as flock master the two might fight some as the young one matures but it’s never resulted in death or serious injury to either. I normally take out the mature rooster before it gets that serious. There is some management involved.
Yes the cockerels can bother the pullets. I’ve never had a pullet injured from this, even when I’ve had a lot more cockerels than pullets. Some people say they see their cockerels gang up on a pullet and keep mating her until she is injured. I’ve never seen that though I believe the people that say they have. When you deal with living animals anything can happen. What I normally see when the cockerels get too active is that the pullets avoid them, often going onto the coop and perching on the roosts where the cockerels can’t really get to them. I don’t see them damaging their psyche to the point I need to pipe in reruns of Dr. Phil or Oprah to help them recover. They manage to eat and drink when the cockerels aren’t around. I do have multiple feeding and eating stations so the pullets don’t have to face the cockerels to eat and drink. Once the cockerels are in the freezer those pullets act like chickens. Some people don’t like to see that but I figure pullets have been raised with a flock that has several cockerels in it for thousands of years. They have developed ways to manage that. I just consider that chickens being chickens.
In my opinion one huge key in all this is that they need lots of room to get through this adolescent phase. If you have them shoehorned into an area where the cockerels can’t run from each other or the mature rooster of the pullets can’t run from the cockerels or avoid them, I could see this ending in tragedy pretty often. One very basic way chickens have learned to live together in a flock is that if there is conflict, the weaker runs away from the stronger or just avoids them to start with. If they don’t have enough room to run away and get away or to avoid to start with, they can’t act like chickens.
