imacowgirl2
Songster
Debating when to move my young cockerels into the bachelor pad and would love to hear how/when others do it and why you do it the way you do…
Bachelor pad currently contains 5 roosters that are all approximately 7-9 months old. 1 will be moving out, into a new coop with his own flock of hens, within the month.
I currently have a batch of 7 week old chicks that contains 3 cockerels and a batch of 2 and 3 week old chicks that contains at last a handful, if not more. I also have two more young cockerels coming at beginning of May as day old chicks that will eventually need integrated.
Based on experience integrating chicks into the hen flock, and setting up the bachelor pad last year, I mostly prefer to integrate chicks as young as possible into their “permanent” flock…but I’ve also heard and read that raising young cockerels in a flock of mature hens make for better mannered roosters in the long run. If I’m going to integrate the cockerels young, the 7 week olds are at about the age I think would be ideal to integrate, so I need to figure out a plan sooner rather than later.
Integrating young holds appeal because it would hopefully help them be seen as less of a threat and be picked on less by the established roosters. Waiting awhile and being able to integrate all the little guys at once also holds a lot of appeal because it gives them the advantage of numbers over the established roosters - there will be more of them than existing roosters so existing roosters can’t pick on all of them at once.
Does everyone prefer to integrate cockerels into a bachelor pad young, or leave them with the older hen flock longer to learn manners from the hens? If you leave them with the hens longer, until what age?
The other consideration is that many of these won’t be staying a long time. 4-6 of them will become permanent new flock members; 8 of them will be shown by my daughter in August at our 4-H show, and those 8 may or may not overlap the permanent ones, depending on how everyone grows out. The rest will be sold ASAP, or go to freezer camp; if they go to freezer camp it probably won’t be until August, since I won’t have time between when they are big enough and then to process them.
Oh and last consideration…head rooster in the bachelor pad is a jerk to humans, and has punched his ticket to freezer camp in August (if not earlier) due to occasional human aggression. I’m not sure if head rooster behavior impacts behavior of young cockerels?? It hasn’t seemed to change the behavior of the other roosters towards humans any, but they were all sexually mature when he started with the human aggressive behaviors.
Bachelor pad currently contains 5 roosters that are all approximately 7-9 months old. 1 will be moving out, into a new coop with his own flock of hens, within the month.
I currently have a batch of 7 week old chicks that contains 3 cockerels and a batch of 2 and 3 week old chicks that contains at last a handful, if not more. I also have two more young cockerels coming at beginning of May as day old chicks that will eventually need integrated.
Based on experience integrating chicks into the hen flock, and setting up the bachelor pad last year, I mostly prefer to integrate chicks as young as possible into their “permanent” flock…but I’ve also heard and read that raising young cockerels in a flock of mature hens make for better mannered roosters in the long run. If I’m going to integrate the cockerels young, the 7 week olds are at about the age I think would be ideal to integrate, so I need to figure out a plan sooner rather than later.
Integrating young holds appeal because it would hopefully help them be seen as less of a threat and be picked on less by the established roosters. Waiting awhile and being able to integrate all the little guys at once also holds a lot of appeal because it gives them the advantage of numbers over the established roosters - there will be more of them than existing roosters so existing roosters can’t pick on all of them at once.
Does everyone prefer to integrate cockerels into a bachelor pad young, or leave them with the older hen flock longer to learn manners from the hens? If you leave them with the hens longer, until what age?
The other consideration is that many of these won’t be staying a long time. 4-6 of them will become permanent new flock members; 8 of them will be shown by my daughter in August at our 4-H show, and those 8 may or may not overlap the permanent ones, depending on how everyone grows out. The rest will be sold ASAP, or go to freezer camp; if they go to freezer camp it probably won’t be until August, since I won’t have time between when they are big enough and then to process them.
Oh and last consideration…head rooster in the bachelor pad is a jerk to humans, and has punched his ticket to freezer camp in August (if not earlier) due to occasional human aggression. I’m not sure if head rooster behavior impacts behavior of young cockerels?? It hasn’t seemed to change the behavior of the other roosters towards humans any, but they were all sexually mature when he started with the human aggressive behaviors.
