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It's not an easy problem.
The old school writers and keepers I have a great deal of respect for recommend learning to handle the chickens., both male and female. The reasoning behind this is one should inspect the chickens one keeps as basic good animal husbandry. If one can't inspect them then one doesn't know if they have problems until they show obvious signs of ill health and often this is too late to take remedial action.
The vast majority of chickens (don't bother making a post about how much your chickens love you and adore being picked up. Any creature that likes being picked up by it's number one predator isn't right in the head
) don't like being handled. Some are more tolerant of it than others.The ideal in my opinion is to be able to do the basic checks (vent, back of neck and under wings) without taking the chicken off the ground and this approach has worked best for me with both males and females. You may have noticed pictures of me doing this on this thread and others.
What chickens particulalry dislike is having their wings immobilized. So learning to pick chickens up by getting them to stand on your hand with their wings free until such time one needs to constrain them is worth learning. I think MJ and a couple of others have found this usefull when taking chickens off roost bars. It works for me and many others. I put the allotment chickens in the coop at night using this technique.
Chickens inspect and groom other chickens and this is always done on the ground or on a roost bar. I introduced waiting roost bars as I call them with the tribes for the more standoffish tribe members on the advice of a Catalan chicken keeping friend.
Here is one example.
At roost time the chickens wait on the outside woodwork for their turn to enter the coop and while they are there it gives the keeper an ideal opportunity to have a look at legs feet and the underside. I have a roost bar outside the allotment coop and as you will have seen, the chickens get on this before going into the coop, with or without my encouragement.
For the novice to chicken inspections, getting the chicken off the roost bar at night is favourite. You'll need a good headtorch. They tend to stay in one place, especially if it's high off the ground (coop roofs work well if you have the right sort of coop).
For keepers with large walk in coops, inspection in the coop is easiest. The chickens aren't carried off to somewhere strange and in general stay calm.
With males, I've done handling them when young which they get used to and handling them as little as possible. I haven't noticed one way or the other leads to aggressive behaviour. What I did get were lifelong friends with those I handled a lot which can be as bigger problem as being standoffish.
The important thing is one must be able to inspect the chickens. I do a basic inspection daily on one or more at the allotments. I used to do a couple a week from each tribe in Catalonia and at the farm in Hertfordshire we did batch inspections daily but it was alot less considerate than the practice I have now due to the numbers involved.
I can't stress enough how imporatn it is to do these inspections; crop and vent checks and at least one body area every day if one can. Along with these a white tissue wipe along the underside of the roost bars in the coop every few days can and will save a lot of small problems turning into a major crisis.
