First - I want to thank you so much for consistently offering wise counsel on BYC. I really appreciate it!
I'll seriously consider option one, as I know someone with quite a few excess roosters. Not sure about temperament, as they're less than a year old. I'm still hoping a broody hen emerges in my flock. I had a BO go broody last year and was really hoping to get a good rooster that way. She set well, but crushed hatching eggs and aggressively killed hatchlings. Won't try again with her! There's no problem with being able to dispatch poorly behaved roosters (my husband's job).
Best of luck with your flock. I hope they produce lots of chicks for you!
At what point (approx. what age) can you be sure of a rooster's temperament? I hear horror stories about "nice" roosters suddenly turning on their owners. Is this something that happens early (e.g., between 6 and 12 months of age) or could it happen at any time?
While it can happen at anytime, pretty much as a rule there are warning signs which show here and there from hatching onwards, which it takes some experience to see because they can be so very subtle. Some people pick up on the signs within their first year of keeping poultry, some never will.
Generally I would say after a few generations of breeding from your own stock you can be sure of temperament. As sure as anyone can, anyway.
In terms of human aggression I have never seen a rooster start late, only ever young, but that would be influenced by my picking up on earlier and subtle warning signs.
However in terms of rooster-rooster (or rooster-hen, or rooster-chick) aggression, that can crop up later, in fact some family lines of chooks and turkeys are quite prone to suddenly turning into very aggressive animals past one or two years old, like a switch has flipped.
Anyone breeding for temperament and not keeping their breeding stock till they die of old age does not genuinely know what they are truly breeding on, and that applies to overall health as well. Physical and mental health is very tightly linked, another angle to consider there. It's also important to note that chickens are not mature at one year old, despite appearances.
The majority of hens and roosters in my experience continue to grow physically and mentally (which can be subtle in some but very obvious in others, for example doubling in size and weight) for up to five years. Generally though most are mature enough for all intents and purposes, officially in their prime, at two years old.
If you never keep males to true prime, how do you know what their fully mature mentality is? You can't. I've learned to watch out for adverts of nice natured animals of which the breeder only ever uses immature parent stock, the equivalent of teenagers. You can't be sure until you know how long they stay stable, and how they are in their true prime.
Culling for small warning signs is the best bet, because in future generations from that animal, they tend to snowball and just get worse and worse, even if they never got worse in the original progenitor showing the warning signs. I used to try to breed negative traits out, and rehabilitate and train and all the rest of that, but after a few years I quit because it was never worth it. All that time and effort and those resources can be better spent on deserving animals.
Ok, now on to some general thoughts and suggestions, for whatever they are worth, for newbies. Sorry in advance for the small novel. I will share info on how and why my flock is nonaggressive, hopefully to assist and encourage anyone who is interested in achieving the same thing. It's very, very doable.
The background for my experiences is an extremely 'mongrelized' flock, so mixed for so many generations that most birds can't be ID'd as being a mix of any breeds in particular. I had some purebreds, started with them, but found them horrendously overrated and riddled with defects both physical and behavioral. There are good purebreds out there of course but I'm not really 'into' them.
Obviously there are many schools of thought about every single aspect of everything to do with poultry (and every other species too lol) so take with a pinch of salt and test with your own animals is my suggestion.
Nothing beats observation, no amount of book-reading will ever enable you to see what's in front of your face if you're not actually looking. No two flocks are identical, so much changes the spectrum of environmental and social influences that help shape every flock.
So while this is all true in my experience it may not be borne out by yours.
X2 to everything Folly's Place said, and I agree with Mrs. K too, natural social structure is so important for teaching both young males and females social manners. Destruction of the natural social order is highly damaging with multi-generational fallout for every species we do it to.
It is also my experience that truly good roosters do not suddenly turn bad, there are warning signs that inexperienced people often miss. None of the roosters I figured to be genuinely good ever turned on people.
The signs almost always show very early; you can learn to spot serious behavioral flaws as young as under a week old. They don't mean nothing, they don't grow out of being aggressive or having other negative behaviors; the whole mindset has to be wrong for a chook to be basically neurotic or psychotic at such a tender age. But some people would rather manage a flock of chronic bullies which turn into 'feathered piranhas' at the drop of a single speck of blood, than cull.
Unfortunately many people have been convinced that cannibalism, brutal bullying, vicious male-female interactions, and so forth are 'just the nature of chickens' --- which is utterly wrong. All the common problems with their behaviors are directly traceable to how we keep them and how we select breeding stock, and thus these problems are easily bred out of family lines. (Breeding show stock obviously makes that very hard since looks are more important than temperament to many show breeders).
I kind of view it as a social responsibility issue, as well as an ethics issue. People and chickens are suffering avoidable harm because violent chooks are being bred on rather than culled.
I cull for bullying, cannibalistic traits, featherpicking, excessive noisiness and spackiness/flightiness and stupidity, aversion to humans, refusal to submit to handling (despite repeated taming attempts which begin from hatching onwards), cross-species sexual attraction, and stuff like that, and now have a very peaceful, nonaggressive flock which has been breeding positive traits on for years after the original problem culling was done, but none of the negative traits some people think are inherent to chickens.
The 'evil eye' is a sure sign of a nasty mentality. If they have a mean look in the eye, you will find out why in the near future. May sound weird but plenty of people know exactly what I'm talking about, and if you don't yet, you soon will, I'd bet. It's like confusing a nice-natured dog's benign gaze with the baleful glare of one which means you harm. Only a real novice will do it, and rarely more than once!
If a chook runs over when it sees you holding another chook, and attacks you and/or that chook, I strongly suggest to cull. That's part of the mob attacking mentality that drives flocks to turn on damaged, trapped, or sick animals, and destroy them. It's also linked to the cannibalistic mindset in most cases, in my opinion, which is utterly aberrational.
Chickens do not naturally bully one another or view one another as food sources, those are warped survival instincts developed under intensive and unnatural husbandry methods sustained for generations.
As it is, my chooks do not attack bleeding, injured, or sick individuals left among the main flock. This makes it easy to treat them without them being stressed by isolation or facing the threat of being perceived as a stranger once reintroduced to the flock after convalescence.
If a rooster dances around you, I also suggest to cull. That's basically a threat/test, a challenge, to which interested hens will crouch to invite mating, and uninterested hens will walk away from. When that dance is done to other males, subordinate roosters will flee, but better matched roosters will respond with aggression; at no point is it an acceptable behavior for a rooster to apply to a human because it is a challenge. A genuinely good rooster never views humans as something to challenge.
Watch out for hens that crouch in the mating invitation at the approach of humans; that's sexual confusion, and while she may never attack you due to perceiving you as a potential mate, there's a decent chance her sons may exhibit sexual attraction to humans, or aggression due to it.
If they view you as being their own kind, that is always a problem.
It's nonsense that all hens squat for humans to indicate 'they will lay an egg in a week or so' as is so often said to newbies. Certain hens around puberty squat to invite the human to mate when mature enough but it's not really ideal. None of mine squat to invite humans but you can pick them up and touch them without them reacting sexually.
Partial sexual imprinting on humans is very common thanks to the fact that artificial insemination and sperm collection are so widely practiced, mainly in commercial breeds, but also in some purebreds, and the confused instinct has subsequently filtered down into all manner of mutts you wouldn't expect it in. Aggression comes hand in hand with that, because if they view you as their own kind, you must be somewhere in the pecking order.
I do not believe in being part of their pecking order, I've seen no proof it's necessary to gain respect from them, nor healthy at all. At best all it gains is fear-based limited respect which you must always reinforce, and you must always carefully behave around them. You can expect other people like children to suffer for being unable to dominate like you can. You will always be expecting an attack from such chickens sooner or later. Because if you're an alpha you can be made into a beta. No chook stays alpha for their whole lives and subordinates are always watching and waiting for their opportunity to climb a rung on the ladder.
A good rooster or hen does not respect you because they view you as the alpha chook, nor because they fear you. They just respect you without you ever doing anything to enforce it. Good temperament is all that is. Such chooks are safe with small children and humans that lack the ability to enforce dominance. Mishandling, even abuse, won't turn them against people, so they can be relied on to not take lifelong offense at one child accidentally hurting them. They can be affectionate with people, they trust them, they're human-oriented, they show respect without ever having to have fear or subjugation instilled into them.
That makes for a stable temperament, because it's not based on what you do or don't do, so you can't accidentally inspire one to view you as a potential subordinate because to such a mindset, your status is simply never up for challenge. If you're alpha chook you will always be up for challenge, because all hierarchies are fluid, always changing based on health, age, and so forth. The whole situation with people forcibly taking alpha role over chooks reminds me of the outdated notion that brutalizing dogs or horses or whatever into submission is the ideal way to get respect from them. It's just not.
I also cull for males that interfere in the female hierarchy. It's not natural at all. Males and females have separate hierarchies, with males competing with males and females with females.
Raised by a hen, you will see cockerels and pullets naturally separate into two separate pecking orders which they sort out within their own gender, before puberty. Adult males and females from generations of segregation can take lifetimes, and their offspring as well, to become normally socialized, and may remain aggressive to the opposite gender. But it's not natural for the species.
On the rare occasion I've had, or seen, roosters interfere in henfights, it makes things worse in the long term because it does not sort out the problem between the hens, only interrupts them settling it themselves, and next time there will be more frustration and aggression.
It becomes a vicious cycle which can end in death whereas if the male had never made himself a third wheel, it would have been sorted with minimal conflict the first time. Third wheels do not solve problems between two conflicting parties; they can't.
Also, chickens have ideal anatomy for head-to-head confrontation with minimal damage, with the dense and large pectoral muscles and fused skeletons protecting internal organs, but not any such anatomical protection for side-on attacks; hens engaged face-to-face with one another, then being kicked in the side by a rooster, are at very high risk of having developing eggs smashed inside them, which causes a very gory and slow death. I've seen that happen once, and during a time of regular female-male conflict back when I first started, I lost count of how many eggs I candled only to find they had multiple star-shaped fractures from impact, which occurred while they were being shelled inside the hen, and only partially shelled over... I've also seen eggs with obvious fractures one doesn't need a torch to see because the breaks are so obvious even though it's still holding form. Such eggs can break inside the hens during laying, it's quite a risk, surviving that comes down to luck of the draw.
Hens do not naturally get kicked in the side on a regular basis, if ever. One possible exception is a mature male kicking a badly mannered cockerel off a hen that's protesting, but it's not like the other male has an egg to break inside his flank area.
The only rooster I ever had that joined in fights never solved anything, but rapidly hens that had always only ever had minimal squabbles with no real violence were heading into serious fights, because he was preventing resolution of their contention. I had to get rid of him to stop the cycle. He was only raised with hens and had no idea that he wasn't one, apparently.
A rooster who rips feathers out of the hens regularly I also cull. Some roosters will stab, bite, twist, tear, gouge etc at hens while mating or while just sitting on them, using beak and often claws and spurs as well.
It's confused instinct again, combined fighting and mating instincts, for which I blame gender segregation practices, since this sort of confusion occurs in every species that is naturally social but which humans have practiced keeping segregated in broken social units for conveniences' sake for many generations.
You see the same thing in sheep, cattle, etc, aberrant sexual behaviors shown towards the same and other gender, sometimes towards infants as well, combined with an abnormal degree of viciousness. Quite a strong trait in terms of how it breeds on.
Once you've seen a rooster or cockerel with good instincts and a good mentality court and mate with hens, you'll see how vicious and brutal some other males are. A cockerel with good instincts and mentality is a perfect gentleman from day one of his sexual activity, never mind those so-called 'terrible teens' stages of chasing and harassing females that some people think are inevitable.
'Overmating' is actually just brutal roosters at work. Normally a hen will signal if she's interested and reject the rooster if not, and a normal male will respect that, but many males have faulty instincts, and will abuse hens and make their lives misery as a matter of course.
Even without segregation, with a ratio of genders that regularly peaks around 50:50 of mature males and females (and immature ones too), I don't have aggression or 'overmating' or any damage to the hens, nor to any of the roosters, which rarely have any conflicts but always spar without hurting one another when they do.
Too many roosters is not actually the problem. Even one nasty rooster can (and does) abuse an entire flock of hens, but particularly his 'favorite'.
Temperament is everything, breed is nothing (but pay attention to the beliefs of the breeder, I suggest, since they've been selecting for traits that match their belief system which is all too often pro-aggression), and there's nothing you can really do in the overwhelming majority of all cases to change a good temperament for the worse, or a bad temperament for the better.
The only time a genuinely good rooster will harm hens is if his spurs are angled inwards too much so he accidentally gouges her flanks (such a rooster will often gouge his own legs accidentally or be completely prevented from ever sitting down by the wayward spurs, too, or you may see him 'high stepping' over his own spurs and note that he never sits on the perch at night) --- such a rooster is best culled because it's a deleterious trait to breed on, and results in the kinds of avoidable damage to himself and others that's unethical to breed on. Sometimes you see them left with their own spurs growing into their legbones or guts, crippling them, because nobody paid attention to that. Like livestock with horns, aberrant angles are a serious issue.
It's acceptable in my opinion for an inexperienced or really deprived male to be a bit clumsy and overenthusiastic, but there is a line across which this becomes abuse. Generally the hen will call it. If she starts really complaining and trying to get free and he won't let her... I'll deal with it. They know when they're hurting one another, they're certainly not that stupid. Some feathers being ripped out on the rare occasion is not something I cull for but a rooster who routinely rips them out is vicious. Feathers are not so easy to rip out, at all, especially for a small animal that size. It's got to take some determination to routinely tear them out, excessive use of force, which is intentional, whether he's yanking back to rip them out or just refusing to respect a hen's rejection so her pulling away is what tears them out.
Contrary to some beliefs it is not necessary for a rooster to 'restrain' a hen at all. If she's willing she will cooperate. Many of my roosters don't even hold on with their beaks at all. I've even had one rooster that would mate in midair while jumping over a hen without even stepping onto her back or touching her in any other way. A little cooperation goes a long, long way.Also, contrary to some popular beliefs, a rooster cannot force a hen to mate. They don't have penises, they have single orifices with multiple uses, if the hen won't line up her reproductive gear it's just not happening and that's that. Most hens though are quite resigned about it and will 'courtesy mate' just to get a male to leave them alone, however they will then often 'sperm dump' so as not to breed him. (If you don't know what that is, it's worth looking up those terms, and 'cryptic female choice mechanisms').
It's never worth it to coerce breedings of males and females that don't like one another, there's always a good reason why. I tried and learned, lol.
I've had some roosters stand on hens and systematically tear out mouthful after mouthful after mouthful of feathers because the hen refused to breed such a poor specimen and he would not respect that. Needless to say those males are long gone and never bred. It's plain unethical and inhumane what some people subject their hens to. More and more studies are proving the importance of female mate selection, and my experience only supports that, if they absolutely will not breed a given male, get rid of him... There's always a very good reason why, which may be made clear in any offspring you get, or years down the track. I persisted with some males for too long and the hens were right, they were not worth breeding despite what they looked like.
I don't make excuses for chickens harming people, I don't believe in that. Some people keep roosters that brutalize their own children and can't cull them because... (insert reason here). Which is akin to valuing the animal over one's own child. A rooster is capable of killing a small child, and have done so in the past, and doubtless will do it again. Maiming isn't much better, they do damage for life, such wounds almost never heal correctly. As with 'toy' breeds of dogs, just because it's small does not mean it's logical to ignore the threat to life it poses.
I also cull for hens that harm babies deliberately, and any hen routinely dangerously clumsy or neglectful with her babies becomes an egglayer only and is generally rehomed if not culled outright.
I cull any bird that reinforces its social status like normal but then chases the subordinate around while they're not offering any challenge, just bullying them despite their obvious submission.
I also cull hens or roosters that come over to a subordinate to harass it while it's doing nothing to provoke that treatment. That's a bit different in the case of a rooster ignoring a hen's protests and another rooster telling him off for it... It's also a different thing if the subordinate gets right into their personal space in a 'rude' way (but even then there's a limit to what punishment they can dish out, and how viciously. The punishment has to fit the crime).
Some hens stab any other chook in the head if it is within reach and while some view that as 'reinforcing the pecking order', I don't so I cull against it. Particularly if you have some crested genetics in your flock (as I do) random head-bashers are most unwelcome, lol.
I also don't tolerate any harassment of new mothers, or chicks. I used to have hens (never capable mothers themselves) that would have a real fixation on harassing hens behaving in broody ways, or doing mothering; I culled it out and it hasn't come back, as negative traits don't tend to.
You can train chooks to be quieter and even shut up on command, but if you have any showing hysterical and excessively vocal traits, best to cull. Besides being ear-sores they can upset the whole flock or train the whole flock to be raucous nonstop. Even on large acreage that can drive people nuts.
Chickens that are highly strung are a liability to themselves and you... Excessive and unfounded fear or anxiety that will not respond to taming attempts and dietary nerve support I won't let breed on.
Another trait I cull for is chickens that grab on and twist and yank instead of pecking mildly at a subordinate. Trying to remove a piece is not okay.
Also, chooks that when cornered, won't try to run left or right, but explode at your face screaming and battering. It's a clever trick, a serious danger to human eyesight, and no more amusing than when a cow or sheep does it. Same trick, same reasons, still dangerous even though the animal is so small.
Any chicken than shows a distinct inclination to have nothing to do with me, and can't be won around, I get rid of.
Also roosters that begin making any variation on predator/suspicious object identified/approaching vocalizations when they spot you, and trying to lead the hens away from you. Such roosters are human-averse, teaching hens to distrust, and can turn even tame hens against you because they get used to taking a rooster's word for it as regards anything potentially threatening around the place; they automatically react to his vocalizations and can end up afraid of you without you doing anything whatsoever to encourage it. If he keeps telling the hens you're a predator... He's got to go.
The same is true for any hen, no matter how previously tame, that starts teaching her chicks the same things. It can be impossible to retrain hens or chicks that have firmly got the idea in their minds that despite you never having harmed them, you're an enemy, because this hen or that rooster said so.
Anyway. Just my 10cent's worth, lol.
Best wishes.
