They eat the extra cockerels because the males are not needed to 'grow' eggs,
plus 'spring chickens' are delicious.
Sounds like they are selling fighting birds.
*Roosters ONLY!* (Rooster Management)
- Thread starter Amos-Moses
- Start date
plus 'spring chickens' are delicious.
Wow, I could not afford to be a "hatch a holic" and just give away the cockerels. It's nice to be able to "think" they all live happily ever after. That's not exactly my version of responsible hatching... but hey if it's working for you and the neighbor and they aren't ending up in public shelters or on the streets... glad for you!I have 9 roosters that need to be rehomed ASAP. I was worried that I would have to cull, but thankfully someone not far from us keeps an all rooster flock-no hens. Plus he free ranges
Well, I can sell pullets all day long because people here want them for egg laying and aren't allowed to have cockerels EVEN if they wanted. VERY few people have space for a bunch of extra cockerels and the antics they pull are much more intense than those of the pullets.
I can give a rats arss about the so called feminine movement, and think the poke that they eat cocks
because a hormone imbalance goes to show that your life must have been impacted by it and you carry some animosity. I mean, it was before my time... 
and ya it gets old... Are men and women capable of doing ALL things equal.. as self reliant person with MANY skills... I can adamantly say no. But yes I do want to be treated fairly and not dismissed by the pig headed "good ol boys"... We can still honor our differences without being ugly to each other. As far as I'm concerned we need each other... but I guess there ya go... I don't qualify as feminist. Just female, and happy to be me. 
Hens aren't above going to the soup pot here. And if I have one that isn't meeting my expected standard for laying or health (not just feather color)... I will send them to the freezer before letting their genetics out and effect my reputation. But the $30 I get for selling them far exceeds the amount of meat they put on my table for a night and therefore makes more sense for me to sell then eat... because I am able to reason things out and make financially sound choices NOT because I'm female.
I acknowledge we all have different markets. Seem like an easy thought that someone who sell mostly cocks is doing so for cock fighting. Which I would personally think is very unacceptable. But I realize they are popular for showing and have met plenty of chicken people to not automatically jump to conclusions.
But sharing and educating them would be more productive then accusing them of being hormonal-y challenged, which if they are is a medical condition and probably not funny. There is no reason to be defensive if their is nothing to hide... 
I'm SURE there are cockfighters on BYC keeping their business on the down low.
So it is your opinion that the cockerels should be saved and the pullets eaten? If I did that where would my eggs come from? I'm sorry but I will keep lopping the heads off those cockerels, as long as I keep hatching them, has nothing to do with testosterone, it's just good flock management. The hens will get there heads lopped of as well when it comes time and will join the cockerels in the freezer camp.
- Aug 16, 2013
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I raise game chickens. When I buy new blood I buy stags. When I sell birds, I sell stags. I don't fight chickens, not because I am morally opposed to it, because that would be hypocritical, but because it is illegal. Basically, people with game chickens buy stags, or pairs. You can't tell as much about a pullet, it looks like a pullet. You can somewhat tell the quality of the stock by the cock. If you just need outside blood, a stag will do it. If you want a new strain, a pair will do it.
Pullets are valuable, and they sometimes get eaten while doing their job, once they are hens. They are usually either laying eggs, setting on eggs, or raising chicks. Around 8 or 9 months out of the year. I wouldn't consider selling a hen if she was raising chicks for me or setting eggs. The few months that she is not so engaged, chicken sales are usually poor. I do cull some at that time as warranted, but the good ones that survived the rigors of free range chick rearing and did a good job will have employment the next year, even if they aren't used for breeding their own bloodlines. It is pretty commonly accepted that if a guy has extra games, it is going to be in the form of males, if you want a female, of known breeding, expect to pay very dearly. Most don't let them go. If it is a female of breeding that wandered out of the woods, it isn't very valuable, outside of chick rearing, and after a few years one has to thin out the extra chick rearers of unknown breeding, but it is hard to make sales of birds of unknown breeding. So they get eaten with the extra woods stags. If they don't get overpopulated I just let them go. If they raise chicks of their own, the more for the freezer, if I take the time to watch one go back in the bushes, I might put something under her of known breeding. Many times egg laying breed chickens.
One shouldn't rush to conclusions when game breeders are selling stags. They need a lot of stags to make pairs. And more stags to sell single. The cocks are what you want for your breeding pens, they are the ones you want to look at, in their full glory.
Back when I had Americans, I have gone and bought four or five different stags to go with a hen I had, in the hopes that one would grow out to be of worthy breeding quality. Sometimes they just don't look right, put on too much weight, don't have the right stance, from the rhode island red that is in them somewhere. You sell all your spares, keep a pair to conserve pen space. The darned things live forever, until they don't. Then you have a pure Law Grey hen and no cock, you don't want to lose her genetics, and then you have to trust the people that have Law Grey stags for sale to actually be honest.
Pullets are valuable, and they sometimes get eaten while doing their job, once they are hens. They are usually either laying eggs, setting on eggs, or raising chicks. Around 8 or 9 months out of the year. I wouldn't consider selling a hen if she was raising chicks for me or setting eggs. The few months that she is not so engaged, chicken sales are usually poor. I do cull some at that time as warranted, but the good ones that survived the rigors of free range chick rearing and did a good job will have employment the next year, even if they aren't used for breeding their own bloodlines. It is pretty commonly accepted that if a guy has extra games, it is going to be in the form of males, if you want a female, of known breeding, expect to pay very dearly. Most don't let them go. If it is a female of breeding that wandered out of the woods, it isn't very valuable, outside of chick rearing, and after a few years one has to thin out the extra chick rearers of unknown breeding, but it is hard to make sales of birds of unknown breeding. So they get eaten with the extra woods stags. If they don't get overpopulated I just let them go. If they raise chicks of their own, the more for the freezer, if I take the time to watch one go back in the bushes, I might put something under her of known breeding. Many times egg laying breed chickens.
One shouldn't rush to conclusions when game breeders are selling stags. They need a lot of stags to make pairs. And more stags to sell single. The cocks are what you want for your breeding pens, they are the ones you want to look at, in their full glory.
Back when I had Americans, I have gone and bought four or five different stags to go with a hen I had, in the hopes that one would grow out to be of worthy breeding quality. Sometimes they just don't look right, put on too much weight, don't have the right stance, from the rhode island red that is in them somewhere. You sell all your spares, keep a pair to conserve pen space. The darned things live forever, until they don't. Then you have a pure Law Grey hen and no cock, you don't want to lose her genetics, and then you have to trust the people that have Law Grey stags for sale to actually be honest.
As soon as gender is known we separate the boys and bump their protein up. By 5-6 months old they're plenty big enough. (depending on breed and type... we narrowed down the flock and phased out all that were small, built too narrow, or otherwise not looking like a table bird) Now, I'm really only working with Marans and Bresse, along with two projects for dual purpose with colorful eggs.
Lot's of breeds are touted as dual purpose, chicken tastes like chicken. I've found that the yield varies quite widely, sometimes within the same breed. White meat to dark meat ratio, body shape, how much meat is on the breast versus the thigh, if the thighs are white or dark meat... lot's of variations out there. Fat deposits, type of fat, skin texture, meat texture.... I'd be fine with never eating an Easter Egger cockerel again, unless he was put in the crockpot for hours, shredded down and drenched in good BBQ sauce.
In having the goal of chicken dinner as the means of dealing with all of the cockerels (I hatch anywhere from 20-50 eggs in a batch, 3-5 batches a year) it has totally changed the way I breed chickens. I look for a certain body type, I get picky on who moves into a breeding pen and we're 0 tolerance on overly aggressive males.
Out of 10-25 boys, I'm looking for the 3-5 who are true gems. Good type, good attitude, correct feathers. They seem to come up about 33% of the time. Those are the boys who are considered for the following year or they move on to breeder homes, after graduating from the bachelor pad.
The most common question I'm asked from bird shoppers is "They're all girls, right?" which then leaves the boys with us. Giving them away doesn't always work, it can take a long time for someone who wants them to show up for them. Charging money for regular old cockerels doesn't work. To get money for a boy, he really needs to be a good example for his breed and come with at least one pullet.
So I've found myself growing out basically everything I hatch, first to see gender, next to see quality. The pullets are sorted two ways, breeding quality or layer quality. Haven't encountered too many duds from the girls.
By the time you've sold eggs, chicks and pullets, the feed for the boys is paid for. To us it doesn't much matter that it takes 5-6 months to get them to table size. By the time we get to that point, the expense has already been covered and we're basically supplementing our diet with free meat.
Roosters will go where the hens are, if they can get there. We keep everyone in pens, free range being too risky with our predator situation. Usually in every batch there is 1 who insists on being awful. He's usually bigger than the rest from hogging the food. Having multiple feeders prevents one from guarding a single food source. An aggressive one is the first to go to freezer camp. After the removal of such a bird, the rest of them are much more relaxed.
It's WAY easier to sell 1 or 2 good quality roosters than it is to give away 5 or more average cockerels. There are some, usually foreigners, who will spend $3-$5 each on a group to eat themselves. First they stalk craigslist for all of the free ones though, not willing to pay until those dry up. With where I've gotten my birds to be and how they're turning out, we're not devaluing them by putting the genetics out there free or cheap.
We enjoy them enough to charge accordingly, if you wanna leave with my dinner that's gonna be $25 for the inconvenience. Haha
In the old days before I wrapped my mind around eating them, I would box up the boys and take them to a swap, with a big free sign. They'd be gone in less than an hour. Back when I had normal chickens and didn't get into specific bloodlines.
Turns out that the SOP for the dual purpose breeds accounts for the shape that makes the better table bird. I had a long time breeder come buy some pullets and she was in LOVE with the width of the rooster that fathered that group, commenting that "Hardly anyone knows anymore to go for that width." It's what fills out the baking pan, opposed to the more efficient build of a narrow type, which makes for a layer type with better feed conversion (what the hatcheries want, more efficient layers). My "fat" girls lay good eggs too, they just have to eat a little more to get there.
When we were culling through the initial batch of Bresse that got us started, there were 5 boys. 1 was worth moving into a breeding pen. There was such a difference between them though that I want to do an order for babies from where that breeder had gotten them, to see if that same variation happens. Plus I need a new rooster to go with the daughters from mine.
I can see my birds changing from one generation to the next and that's pretty neat to watch. Having a good culling system is essential to a good breeding program. Knowing what to cull for within a specific breed is important too, so that the better cockerels actually have value.
In some regions they'll bring something at auctions. Not in our area though, we're definitely in a hen driven market. We sure eat good though!
The Marans have white meat thighs, a decent amount on the breast and thick skin that makes for a juicy baked bird. The Bresse are more delicate in texture, thinner skinned, larger breasts. Neither gets globby fat deposits.
If you want to be a breeder, it's worth getting to know your birds from the inside out. The feathers can hide a lot of their structure, you can tell a lot by how they feel, how long the keel bone is, if there is anything developing on the breast, how wide they are compared to others of the same breed. Having them penned up makes it easier to get your hands on them for evaluations.
We do the same with the Turkeys. We have 9 toms growing out in pasture tractors who's feed has already been paid for from Spring/Summer poult sales.
I was surprised by the scale we had to reach in order to come close to keeping ourselves in poultry year round. Just to get to where the hatches were big enough at one time. Next year I'm hoping to get enough eggs to do larger, quarterly hatches. We ended up keeping most of the pullets this past year unless they were of a breed we're phasing out.
Congrats to this Blue Birchen Marans who graduated from the bachelor pad and earned himself 10 ladies!
Lot's of breeds are touted as dual purpose, chicken tastes like chicken. I've found that the yield varies quite widely, sometimes within the same breed. White meat to dark meat ratio, body shape, how much meat is on the breast versus the thigh, if the thighs are white or dark meat... lot's of variations out there. Fat deposits, type of fat, skin texture, meat texture.... I'd be fine with never eating an Easter Egger cockerel again, unless he was put in the crockpot for hours, shredded down and drenched in good BBQ sauce.
In having the goal of chicken dinner as the means of dealing with all of the cockerels (I hatch anywhere from 20-50 eggs in a batch, 3-5 batches a year) it has totally changed the way I breed chickens. I look for a certain body type, I get picky on who moves into a breeding pen and we're 0 tolerance on overly aggressive males.
Out of 10-25 boys, I'm looking for the 3-5 who are true gems. Good type, good attitude, correct feathers. They seem to come up about 33% of the time. Those are the boys who are considered for the following year or they move on to breeder homes, after graduating from the bachelor pad.
The most common question I'm asked from bird shoppers is "They're all girls, right?" which then leaves the boys with us. Giving them away doesn't always work, it can take a long time for someone who wants them to show up for them. Charging money for regular old cockerels doesn't work. To get money for a boy, he really needs to be a good example for his breed and come with at least one pullet.
So I've found myself growing out basically everything I hatch, first to see gender, next to see quality. The pullets are sorted two ways, breeding quality or layer quality. Haven't encountered too many duds from the girls.
By the time you've sold eggs, chicks and pullets, the feed for the boys is paid for. To us it doesn't much matter that it takes 5-6 months to get them to table size. By the time we get to that point, the expense has already been covered and we're basically supplementing our diet with free meat.
Roosters will go where the hens are, if they can get there. We keep everyone in pens, free range being too risky with our predator situation. Usually in every batch there is 1 who insists on being awful. He's usually bigger than the rest from hogging the food. Having multiple feeders prevents one from guarding a single food source. An aggressive one is the first to go to freezer camp. After the removal of such a bird, the rest of them are much more relaxed.
It's WAY easier to sell 1 or 2 good quality roosters than it is to give away 5 or more average cockerels. There are some, usually foreigners, who will spend $3-$5 each on a group to eat themselves. First they stalk craigslist for all of the free ones though, not willing to pay until those dry up. With where I've gotten my birds to be and how they're turning out, we're not devaluing them by putting the genetics out there free or cheap.
We enjoy them enough to charge accordingly, if you wanna leave with my dinner that's gonna be $25 for the inconvenience. Haha
In the old days before I wrapped my mind around eating them, I would box up the boys and take them to a swap, with a big free sign. They'd be gone in less than an hour. Back when I had normal chickens and didn't get into specific bloodlines.
Turns out that the SOP for the dual purpose breeds accounts for the shape that makes the better table bird. I had a long time breeder come buy some pullets and she was in LOVE with the width of the rooster that fathered that group, commenting that "Hardly anyone knows anymore to go for that width." It's what fills out the baking pan, opposed to the more efficient build of a narrow type, which makes for a layer type with better feed conversion (what the hatcheries want, more efficient layers). My "fat" girls lay good eggs too, they just have to eat a little more to get there.
When we were culling through the initial batch of Bresse that got us started, there were 5 boys. 1 was worth moving into a breeding pen. There was such a difference between them though that I want to do an order for babies from where that breeder had gotten them, to see if that same variation happens. Plus I need a new rooster to go with the daughters from mine.
I can see my birds changing from one generation to the next and that's pretty neat to watch. Having a good culling system is essential to a good breeding program. Knowing what to cull for within a specific breed is important too, so that the better cockerels actually have value.
In some regions they'll bring something at auctions. Not in our area though, we're definitely in a hen driven market. We sure eat good though!
The Marans have white meat thighs, a decent amount on the breast and thick skin that makes for a juicy baked bird. The Bresse are more delicate in texture, thinner skinned, larger breasts. Neither gets globby fat deposits.
If you want to be a breeder, it's worth getting to know your birds from the inside out. The feathers can hide a lot of their structure, you can tell a lot by how they feel, how long the keel bone is, if there is anything developing on the breast, how wide they are compared to others of the same breed. Having them penned up makes it easier to get your hands on them for evaluations.
We do the same with the Turkeys. We have 9 toms growing out in pasture tractors who's feed has already been paid for from Spring/Summer poult sales.
I was surprised by the scale we had to reach in order to come close to keeping ourselves in poultry year round. Just to get to where the hatches were big enough at one time. Next year I'm hoping to get enough eggs to do larger, quarterly hatches. We ended up keeping most of the pullets this past year unless they were of a breed we're phasing out.
Congrats to this Blue Birchen Marans who graduated from the bachelor pad and earned himself 10 ladies!
http://hubertkeller.com/recipes/coq-au-vin/
This is just one version of coq au vin. Takes a little preparation and time, but marinating the bird in the wine for 1,2 or 3 days really makes it so good.
I bet your boys are beautiful! Those are some cool breeds.
This is just one version of coq au vin. Takes a little preparation and time, but marinating the bird in the wine for 1,2 or 3 days really makes it so good.
I bet your boys are beautiful! Those are some cool breeds.
AudieWarren
Songster
I have just recently separated all but 2 roosters from the flock. We are planning on plumping them up for dinner.
Wow, I could not afford to be a "hatch a holic" and just give away the cockerels. It's nice to be able to "think" they all live happily ever after. That's not exactly my version of responsible hatching... but hey if it's working for you and the neighbor and they aren't ending up in public shelters or on the streets... glad for you!
Well, I can sell pullets all day long because people here want them for egg laying and aren't allowed to have cockerels EVEN if they wanted. VERY few people have space for a bunch of extra cockerels and the antics they pull are much more intense than those of the pullets.
I can give a rats arss about the so called feminine movement, and think the poke that they eat cocks
Hens aren't above going to the soup pot here. And if I have one that isn't meeting my expected standard for laying or health (not just feather color)... I will send them to the freezer before letting their genetics out and effect my reputation. But the $30 I get for selling them far exceeds the amount of meat they put on my table for a night and therefore makes more sense for me to sell then eat... because I am able to reason things out and make financially sound choices NOT because I'm female.
I acknowledge we all have different markets. Seem like an easy thought that someone who sell mostly cocks is doing so for cock fighting. Which I would personally think is very unacceptable. But I realize they are popular for showing and have met plenty of chicken people to not automatically jump to conclusions.
I'm SURE there are cockfighters on BYC keeping their business on the down low.
I've been keeping chickens for almost 6 years and I have never had as many roosters as I do now, I just threw a bunch of eggs in the bator (I didn't expect many of them to hatch, but I got 16 out of 18). We live in the country, so whoever is rehomed will live a long, happy life
Well written and informative... you should do an article!
Last year I sold a lot of chicks.... I'm considering not selling ANY chicks and just growing things out for myself... selling only extra pullets that don't meet my standard... and protecting/being stingy with my genetics.
AudieWarren
Songster
What part of Alabama are you in?
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