really mean hen

greenapple

Songster
11 Years
Feb 8, 2008
171
2
129
Central Florida
I recently let my cornish roo out with the girls to free range. The BR girls all accepted him after a little picking on, but my EE girls seem to hate him. The pecking order starts with all three BR girls, then the EE girls. Pixie Dark is on the next to last rung, but she attacks the roo as if she was a roo. Neither one will let him anywhere near them, and if they see him they will go out of their way to attack him. The BR girls go after the EE girls if they see them attack him. PD has had a lot of neck feathers pulled out, and is missing a lot of her beard and muffs from either FooFoo fighting back or the BRs trying to pull her off. I don't like keeping her all cooped up, but what else can I do?
 
I have an EE and another EE cross and they are the meanest birds in the coop! I'll never have another, I will tell you! I just eliminated another EE cross the other evening for unacceptable behavior. These were given to me, and the one cross is simply lovely and huge, with good egg laying potential but she is the only really mean hen to the 5 wk. old babies. She is only 5 months old but has moved to the top of the pecking order already, top rung on the roost every night and the rooster's new favorite. Quite the diva! If she weren't so beautiful and such a steady egg layer already, she would be slated for culling.
 
I have found through time that a rooster that is roughly the same size or smaller then my layers is for lack of better wording, dead meat. The hens will each in turn fight any new rooster put in unless he is head and shoulders above them.
 
he is smaller than most of the girls, but the only ones that go after him are the EE's, the three BR's don't mind him. I just released my OEGBH, she was raised with the youngest BR, he went after her, so he is back in the dog crate. It is kinda funny, the one BR that spends all her time in the main yard tried to protect the cornish roo from the ee's, but tried to kill him when he went after the OEGBH. I tried to keep the banny hen in the tractor with the OEGBR, but they didn't want to have anything to do with each other. I wonder what the mix would look like from the White Laced Red Cornish and my Barred Rock?
 
In my coops I had to separate my RIR roo from my much smaller Speckled Hamburg because I was told that he had almost killed other roos much larger than him and when I placed my RIR in with him he was pecking him. Maybe I just have a wimp RIR roo. LOL!
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At first I thought my cornish roo was a big chicken, the girls would just look his way and he would run for cover. Eventually he worked up the nerve to go after the BR hens, as they are the top hens, and all three accepted him. He tried to be a big roo for the EE's too, but they just beat him up, one of the BR's usually save him. After we released everyone after TS Fay finally passed, the EE hen was extremely nasty him, we broke it up a couple of times, as soon as she would see him she would run to him and attack.
 

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