Rooster Being Cannibalized

[Sally PB]

I've read on here that lack of protein in the diet can lead to feather picking. Is he getting enough? Maybe another diet deficiency? I don't know enough to recommend something in particular; maybe someone else can offer some help.

Perhaps starting this as a new thread will get more attention to your specific problem. Good luck!

 

[TheMother]

He sounds like a good enough rooster. The hens sound like they come from intensively/ artificially reared stock. You can breed mental/behavioral/instinctual faults into animals by preventing them from acting on normal instincts for enough generations, but these faults are hard to breed out, because so many of them are so detrimental. Easier to cull and replace with stock that have more natural instincts or better suited domestic traits.

In my experience, a male "breaking up" hen fights is just a domestic trait we've bred into them, and it's not present in the wild. I don't tolerate that from my roosters; a stud male is worth nothing if he's harming stud females, just like a chick killer hen is worth nothing to me. The hen fights exist to determine which is suitable to be dominant. A male stopping them from sorting out the pecking order serves no real purpose. The hens have their own hierarchy, independent of the males, and instinct drives them to make sure each hen is socially graded on her level of quality.

A rooster never naturally has to fight hens to reach the dominant rooster status, because this is a gender specific and exclusive hierarchy. It's the same with hens and the dominant hen status. (Unless you have a rooster who also tries to hold top hen spot, as some people do).

When I've seen a male interfere in female fights, it's always been a negative trait which may seem to solve a petty fight in the short term, but actually tends to create more violence down the track between the two combatants, which have been prevented from resolving their status dispute in the first place. They will keep trying until they reach a resolution. A third party breaking up a dominance battle between two members of the opposite sex solves nothing between them, it just postpones it; the level of violence is often likelier to escalate as a result. I'm sure there is the exception to every rule though. But personally, I won't keep hens or roosters who can't resolve their issues as quickly and harmlessly as possible, the first time they contend over it. Keeping intolerant animals begets its own issues because they breed more of the same, and I don't have the time of day for that.

Hens compete with hens, roosters compete with roosters, neither of them is dominant over the other gender. Not naturally, anyway. In domesticity we get extremes of such behavior, with hens beating/killing roos and roos beating/killing hens, thanks to humans having disintegrated the basic family unit and raised them in artificial environments so the once-standard social instincts vary widely. Dominance battles between hens never naturally involve a male. That'd be like a hen interfering in a battle between roosters. It defeats the whole purpose, which is for the hens or roosters fighting to ascertain which of them is the fittest to pass on their genes. Such fights aren't usually fatal, even in the wild. In mentally healthy and instinctively sound animals, such fights are brief and often permanently resolved, for the rest of their lives, in a matter of seconds, with no harm done, whether the combatants are male or female.

If a wild male harms a female, he stands an increased chance of failing to pass on his genes. Female-abusive males tend to wipe themselves out of the genepool, just like chick-killing hens do. There is no natural instinct for a male chicken to attack a female. That's why he's not standing up for himself, even when attacked. Domestic chickens, especially those from intensive farming backgrounds, are often cannibalistic and many others don't have any corresponding instinctual behavior to deal with such an aberrant mentality, because it's unnatural.

Some people say all chickens turn cannibalistic when protein deficient or bored, but this isn't true; in many the old instincts are still semi-intact and if put in such a situation, they will starve to death without trying to consume another chicken. It's a matter of behavioral inheritance.

For his own good, I'd separate him, let him heal, and perhaps consider getting rid of any hens who are overly keen on featherpicking/cannibalism. Or just separate those hens in the first place, and not bother separating him. Such traits tend to breed true. If it's not something you can easily train out of them, and you don't want to train it out of each generation in turn, it may be wisest to cull the perpetrators. But there are probably a whole bunch of solutions to your dilemma, so best wishes with finding what's right for you.

I see this this quite an old post. May I just say, wow! Thoroughly informative and your words flow so well, my brain isn't even putting up a fight to absorb this information.