Which breed is best for rooster?

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

I have 3 different chickens, Araucanas/Ameraucanas/EE, Australorps and a Turken/ naked neck which I'm pretty sure is a rooster. My question is which of these three makes the baddest rooster? I ordered one EE rooster and a Australorp in my shipment from McMurray so I should end up with at least one of each but for the odd reason I get too many roosters which are the ones to keep that will best protect the flock? I will have around 38 birds total so I was thinking 2 roosters but no more than 3, depends on how the hens tail feathers are holding up lol. I know the Australorp will be biggest but the Araucanas/Ameraucanas rooster will be faster and more agile then no idea with the Turken, it's red so idk if it's bred with a road island red or if a Turken can mate with another Turken if so mine is red lol. In your experience which roosters to keep and which cook/sell?

Thanks

 

[sourland]

Keep those that are not human aggressive.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I always recommend you keep as few roosters as you can and still meet your goals. That’s not because you are guaranteed problems with more roosters, just that you are more likely to have problems. I don’t know your goals but I can kind of guess. I think you are going to free range them and you want hatching eggs.

A Turken is a chicken. Breeds are a manmade thing. Chickens will mate with a chicken regardless of breed. I’m aware of a couple of fatal genes, genes that if they pair up they will kill the chick. The Frizzle gene is one but you don’t have that. The other is the rumpless gene that Araucana have. If your EE’s don’t have a tail then they probably have this gene. If you cross a rumpless chicken with a rumpless chicken then about 25% will die before hatch.

The Turken naked neck gene is not a fatal gene. It is dominant so any chick that gets it will have a naked neck but a Turken can mate with a Turken without a problem. They will mate with any chicken.

You’ll get different opinions on how effective roosters are in protecting their flock. Some will sacrifice themselves to give the flock a chance to get away but the vast majority of mine tend to lead their flock to safety once a true danger has been identified instead of sacrificing themselves. I’ve had two separate dog attacks where I lost several chickens. The dominant roosters survived both those attacks without injury. What they are going to do will depend on the personality of the individual rooster. With your breeds I think it is just luck with what they will do.

You do get some protection from roosters though. They tend to be good lookouts, watching for threats. They are more likely to see something coming than a flock without a rooster, though often a dominant hen will perform the same lookout duties in a roosterless flock. Each chicken, rooster or hen, is an individual and you can’t be sure how they will behave.

Another advantage to a rooster is that a rooster will usually check out something suspicious. If they see something suspicious they will normally position themselves between the flock and the perceived danger until they determine if it is truly a threat or just something that can be ignored. This is a trait I like.

A rooster may be able to defend against something small and live through the encounter, maybe a puppy, cat, or small hawk. But any major predator will make short work of the rooster if he tries to fight.

Bottom line, you can’t be sure how any of them will react until they are in that situation and that is an individual thing. Don’t pick a rooster for defense based on breed.

I’m not a believer in magic ratios of hens to roosters. You can have the same overmating or barebacked hen problems with good or bad hen to roster ratios. There are a whole lot of different factors involved. The hens have a part to play as well as the roosters. Many breeders keep one rooster with one or two hens throughout the breeding season without these problems. People with one rooster and over 20 hens have these problems. The worst time is during adolescence. They mature at different rates (cockerels before pullets), hormones are running uncontrolled and wild, they don’t have good technique, pullets don’t cooperate so the cockerels use brute force, good technique is totally unheard of, it gets pretty wild and wooly with adolescents. Most mature hens and roosters behave quite a bit different behaviors but on occasion you get a hen or rooster that seems to never mature.

Occasionally you get a hen that has brittle feathers. No matter how correct his technique the feathers just break. It’s usually a nutrient/genetic thing. If they all have brittle feathers then it’s a flock nutrient problem, but if it is only a very few then it’s much more likely that genetically the hens can’t process those nutrients correctly. When you see a problem it often helps to determine if it is an individual chicken problem or an across the board flock problem before you decide how to treat it. When I first started out here, my first flock was one rooster and eight hens. Two hens developed bare backs so I ate them. With a much worst ratio, 6 to 1, the bareback problem went away and never came back in future generations.

Two young viral active roosters should be able to keep 3 dozen hens fertile in a free range situation. Three is certainly a reasonable number and it could help to have a “spare”. Instead of worrying too much about breed, keep the ones that look and act like you want the chicks to look and act when they grow up. I tend to keep the early maturing cockerels too since I think they make the best flock masters.

Good luck. Sounds like you are in for some fun.

 

[Michael OShay]

Keep those that are not human aggressive.

I agree with sourland. None of those breeds are going to be able to physically protect your flock from any serious predators. The most that any of them will be able to do is sound an alarm. I would recommend keeping the one that is the most gentle where people are concerned. You do not want to risk a rooster seriously injuring someone, nor do you want to breed aggression toward humans into your flock.

 

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

I always recommend you keep as few roosters as you can and still meet your goals. That’s not because you are guaranteed problems with more roosters, just that you are more likely to have problems. I don’t know your goals but I can kind of guess. I think you are going to free range them and you want hatching eggs.

A Turken is a chicken. Breeds are a manmade thing. Chickens will mate with a chicken regardless of breed. I’m aware of a couple of fatal genes, genes that if they pair up they will kill the chick. The Frizzle gene is one but you don’t have that. The other is the rumpless gene that Araucana have. If your EE’s don’t have a tail then they probably have this gene. If you cross a rumpless chicken with a rumpless chicken then about 25% will die before hatch.

The Turken naked neck gene is not a fatal gene. It is dominant so any chick that gets it will have a naked neck but a Turken can mate with a Turken without a problem. They will mate with any chicken.

You’ll get different opinions on how effective roosters are in protecting their flock. Some will sacrifice themselves to give the flock a chance to get away but the vast majority of mine tend to lead their flock to safety once a true danger has been identified instead of sacrificing themselves. I’ve had two separate dog attacks where I lost several chickens. The dominant roosters survived both those attacks without injury. What they are going to do will depend on the personality of the individual rooster. With your breeds I think it is just luck with what they will do.

You do get some protection from roosters though. They tend to be good lookouts, watching for threats. They are more likely to see something coming than a flock without a rooster, though often a dominant hen will perform the same lookout duties in a roosterless flock. Each chicken, rooster or hen, is an individual and you can’t be sure how they will behave.

Another advantage to a rooster is that a rooster will usually check out something suspicious. If they see something suspicious they will normally position themselves between the flock and the perceived danger until they determine if it is truly a threat or just something that can be ignored. This is a trait I like.

A rooster may be able to defend against something small and live through the encounter, maybe a puppy, cat, or small hawk. But any major predator will make short work of the rooster if he tries to fight.

Bottom line, you can’t be sure how any of them will react until they are in that situation and that is an individual thing. Don’t pick a rooster for defense based on breed.

I’m not a believer in magic ratios of hens to roosters. You can have the same overmating or barebacked hen problems with good or bad hen to roster ratios. There are a whole lot of different factors involved. The hens have a part to play as well as the roosters. Many breeders keep one rooster with one or two hens throughout the breeding season without these problems. People with one rooster and over 20 hens have these problems. The worst time is during adolescence. They mature at different rates (cockerels before pullets), hormones are running uncontrolled and wild, they don’t have good technique, pullets don’t cooperate so the cockerels use brute force, good technique is totally unheard of, it gets pretty wild and wooly with adolescents. Most mature hens and roosters behave quite a bit different behaviors but on occasion you get a hen or rooster that seems to never mature.

Occasionally you get a hen that has brittle feathers. No matter how correct his technique the feathers just break. It’s usually a nutrient/genetic thing. If they all have brittle feathers then it’s a flock nutrient problem, but if it is only a very few then it’s much more likely that genetically the hens can’t process those nutrients correctly. When you see a problem it often helps to determine if it is an individual chicken problem or an across the board flock problem before you decide how to treat it. When I first started out here, my first flock was one rooster and eight hens. Two hens developed bare backs so I ate them. With a much worst ratio, 6 to 1, the bareback problem went away and never came back in future generations.

Two young viral active roosters should be able to keep 3 dozen hens fertile in a free range situation. Three is certainly a reasonable number and it could help to have a “spare”. Instead of worrying too much about breed, keep the ones that look and act like you want the chicks to look and act when they grow up. I tend to keep the early maturing cockerels too since I think they make the best flock masters.

Good luck. Sounds like you are in for some fun.

I have yet to decide if I will free range or build a chicken run, I'm Deff not letting them out of the coop/stall until there fully grown, there is way too many coons, Hawks, owls, coyotes ext around here for a young chicken to survive. I want to let them graze a field that's already fenced in, I just have to put a smaller fence on the one I have and I was gonna do an electric fence around that with string above, all that would take serious coin though, so maybe this spring I will build a run for them maybe idk, I will have either 38 or 45 total, a buddy wanted 7-8 chicks and I may end up selling some when the next shipment comes in. I converted a horse stall into a coop, with 45 birds they have almost 5 sq ft a bird with enough roost for 75 birds at 8in per bird and enough nesting boxes for almost 80 hens, it's attached but closed off to two other stalls which I will let the run in to eat bugs this fall, so kinda like a chicken run just more secure where I won't have to shut them up every night. They won't need to go outside in the snow anyway and won't be fully grown until the middle of winter so I figured I have plenty of time on the run. I want to keep roosters around for defense reasons, to keep an eye on the hens and keep them safe, I hear if a coon attacks it kills the rooster first so if I start losing roosters I will know I have a critter prob. With my schedule I'm gone from 1pm-11pm so won't be able to come to there aid if a critter did get in somehow. Plus the barn sits 300ft or greater from the house, and stalls are on the opposite side of the barn which makes hearing the chickens in distress even harder. With there 8 gal waterer and 30lb hanging feeder, I don't always go back there everyday, when they start laying that will change. There heat lamp is timed for 8pm-7am, 250w bulb so it heats the entire coop on cooler nights than shuts off around the time the sun comes up. The new chicks will get heat 24/7 for there first 3-4 weeks like these did. Lol a bit off topic

 

[donrae]

Raccoons don't tell roosters from hens. They just enjoy meat.

That probably came from the assumption a rooster will sacrifice himself for his hens. Well, some will, some won't. And you can't really count on a young bird to do so, even if he would in a year or so.

With the set up you've described, I'd just grow them all out and see how it goes. At some point one of them will cross a line with you, or be too aggressive to the hens, or you simply won't like him. At that point, the bird is butchered. Then you're down to two, which may be a manageable number with your hens. If one of those just doesn't work, for whatever reason, butcher him. If none of your current birds are a good fit, cockerels are a dime a dozen and easy to add later. Keep in mind a flock is not a set organism, it's fluid and can continually change according to whatever works well for you and your set-up, predator load, schedule, etc.

 

[enola]

Ridge runner, the rumpless gene is not lethal. The tuft gene is the one that is lethal. When you breed two tufted chickens some of the embryoes will die in the shell before hatching.

I breed clean faced, rumpless Araucanas and normally all eggs that make it to lockdown hatch.

If these chickens came from a hatchery, they sre not Araucanas or Ameraucanas.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Ridge runner, the rumpless gene is not lethal. The tuft gene is the one that is lethal. When you breed two tufted chickens some of the embryoes will die in the shell before hatching.

I breed clean faced, rumpless Araucanas and normally all eggs that make it to lockdown hatch.

If these chickens came from a hatchery, they sre not Araucanas or Ameraucanas.

You are correct, my mistake. It's the tufts that are the problem not the rumpless genes. I’m glad you corrected me. In feel bad about spreading false information. Tufts are a cluster of feathers that grow just below the earlobes and stick out. Araucanas have tufts.

Don’t confuse those with muffs. There is nothing fatal about the muff genes. Muffs are a cluster of feathers around and below the eyes often in conjunction with a beard. The beard is a cluster of feathers on the throat. Ameraucanas have muffs.

 

[enola]

I knew you know better.

Like you, I like to keep all information straight.

 

[BrokeFarmerJohn]

The birds I ordered are advertised as Araucanas/Ameraucanas but described as a Easter egger so there neither breed or a mix of both but still have the blue egg gene, or at least should. I doubt I will hatch my own eggs being I have so many diff breed of chickens, it will be hard to keep the breeds apart, rooster to hen of the same breed ext.