Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Perris]

Mine have been injured. 2 were dead. one had what appeared to be a broken neck. The cockerel had a horrified look on his face and was much gentler after that.
The other dead one had a big gash on her side under the wing and a different cockerel continued to mate her corpse.
After all this drama I tried a bachelor grow out. But the boy on the bottom didn't fair too well either.

that must have been horrible; I feel for you having to deal with that.

I wonder what drives the differences in behaviour; individual personalities I guess, which in turn seems to be a combo of nature and nurture. Other explanations?

 

[MrsNorthie]

Cockerels here will hang out by a nest box when the rooster is with the rest of the hens 140 ft up the hill. He will try to grab her as she comes out and have his way before the rooster can get there.

I I have found that it helps having 2 mature Roosters with the young, overly-enthusiastic cockerels. If one of the cockerels gets grabby, one of the Roosters, or even one of the more senior hens, will give him stern talking to. With guidance from the 2 mature boys, the cockerels seem to be learning good habits, they aren't as grabby and if they do chase, the hens run into a crowd of hens or to Spud or Squeaky.

 

[Molpet]

I I have found that it helps having 2 mature Roosters with the young, overly-enthusiastic cockerels. If one of the cockerels gets grabby, one of the Roosters, or even one of the more senior hens, will give him stern talking to. With guidance from the 2 mature boys, the cockerels seem to be learning good habits, they aren't as grabby and if they do chase, the hens run into a crowd of hens or to Spud or Squeaky.

Yes I usually have, per coop, a dominant rooster and a subordinate to help keep the cockerels in line. But the roosters sometimes don't care about the lowest hens.
.

 

[Molpet]

that must have been horrible; I feel for you having to deal with that.

I wonder what drives the differences in behaviour; individual personalities I guess, which in turn seems to be a combo of nature and nurture. Other explanations?

Could be.
After all humans are different personalities and they should be able to reason out they will end up in jail for bad behavior.
Silly cockerels don't know the consequences for their actions.

 

[Molpet]

Somehow i got the byc friend award

Congratulations

 

[fluffycrow]

this prompts me to post on something I've been thinking about for a while. It might not make much sense to those without roos, those whose birds are confined, or those whose birds are young, but I think it's worth floating anyway.

So, it concerns chasing and grabbing to mate (often described by novice keepers on byc in what seem to me to be silly inappropriate human terms like rape). There's a lot of it here. And yet, there are very few bare patches on hens, and no wounds to the head area or comb, or for that matter on their backs or sides where roos' spurs apparently can cause injury (though I haven't seen it here).

I am not calling into question other people's testimonies or suggesting that these things don't happen. A few hens here have had bare spots on their heads where overenthusiastic roos have yanked out feathers, and bare spots on their backs from more attention than their plumage can cope with.

But what I now believe, on the basis of watching a lot of this sort of behaviour, in an environment where all birds run free, is that the chase in chickens is like the chase in a lot of species' mating behaviour; the hen is testing the roo's fitness to sire any chicks she may have. And if he can catch her, maybe after the good run/ workout she put him through, he has less energy to expend on harmful and potentially damaging behaviour like aggressive head pecking. Just a thought.

Pretty sure Shad has reported similar findings on his understanding your rooster article. The chase and grab exhibited by the hens and roosters here (one could call it the “Dance of chickens”, perhaps? ) seems to paint a similar picture.

There are some exceptions though, mostly from overly hormonal cockerels. You might remember the cockerel in the Tsouloufati group last year. I ended up having him butchered, because he was causing too much distress to the hens. More specifically, he’d wait till the afternoon, when they were on the (low) roosts, and grab them from wherever he could to try and pin them down to mate. During the day, even the pullets avoided him as much as they could, staying almost a meter away at all times.

There aren’t as many “bad males” as most believe, and even more might be able to grow out of their extremely disruptive phase, but maybe the chase and grab is more complicated than we think. Perhaps if we really pay attention, we could figure out some distinct differences between a safe chase and grab and a dangerous one. The answer might be in the hen’s behaviour/response to it

 

[BDutch]

I’m not sure that’s true. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have many people on this thread and on BYC in general reporting that their broodies removed and/or ate the unfertilised eggs in the nest.

I think this is something they do later in the process. Not in the beginning. Not that I have seen anyway.

Towards the end the infertile eggs might get a strage smell ? Or the broody notices movements and sounds of living chicks to whom they start to talk. And some hens discard the ones that don’t?
My Dutch don’t do this or not properly. Last time they threw out eggs that had almost full grown chicks in them.

Im not sure hens really know they need a rooster for fertilised eggs. Humans didn’t know much about such things either in the old days. Until marriage nobody told young men and woman in our (Victorian) culture anything about the ‘birds and the bees’ . Young woman who had sex often didn’t know they could get pregnant.
A few centuries ago men thought it was always the woman who was infertile if there was no baby on its way after a period with regular intercourse, and they thought the baby was 100% made from their male sperm.

 

[BDutch]

Somehow i got the byc friend award

Great! Congrats!

 

[Shadrach]

Somehow i got the byc friend award

About time.

 

[RoyalChick]

Somehow i got the byc friend award

Congratulations.