Robin says:

April 21st, 2008 at 12:26 pm

Roosters are fine until you have big bruises on your rear end, from where the rooster did a sneak attack on you. Then you end up walking around with a huge stick or shovel to protect yourself. Their toes have ripped through jean material.

Out of the ten or so roosters I have had, our last two have been nice (so far) One is a Brahma giant (I picked out because they were a quiet breed, and he was supposed to be a she) and the other is Japanese bantam.

The rest of them ended up in the soup pot…..

deb w says:

April 21st, 2008 at 1:47 pm

Robin,
If you have more than one rooster at a time you have fighting (a natural instinctive thing). They will also pick on some of the smaller hens to weed out the ones that are “weaker”. Sorry to say your partner may be right if you get more than one rooster somebodys gotta go…. I am not sure what breed Trouble is butif he is starting out to be agressive this could be a bad portent.

Robin says:

April 21st, 2008 at 3:30 pm

I should say that this is after about 13 years of chickens, and I never had more than two roosters at a time, unless you count the two times I raised chickens for food ( once was 40 chickens and the other time was 100 of the buggers. My kids were so tired of chicken…)

sometimes I have had 1 rooster, sometimes two. These last two have not yet turned bad and they are about 2 years old, they have shown no signs of aggressiveness at all.

I usually have 14+ chickens at a time. Right now I have 16 hens and the two roosters. The two roosters have such a size difference - one is about 14+ pounds and the other about 5 pounds, and there is no strong personalities that there is no fighting between them.

With the other roosters I had, there would be some fights, but they would soon sort out the dominance thing and usually there would be no blood. They have enough room in their pen so there was no crowding issues. The nastiest roosters I had were the Polish roosters. They turned bad quickly ( I had two of them.)
I try not to get roosters, but after a trip to Houle’s in Forest Lake with a daughter in tow, I would come home with a chick or two and no idea what the sex was…

Even with all the advice, remember your chickens have their own personalities and things may turn out different than what others have experienced.

robin says:

April 21st, 2008 at 8:20 pm

You will not recognize the crow at first, it is weak and scraggly.

And roosters don’t just crow at dawn, they crow if they get woken up, they crow to say how good they feel, they crow when they feel there is danger, they crow because they like the sound of their voice…..

christina says:

May 19th, 2008 at 12:45 pm

we had the exact same problem with our americuana ‘hen’ princess diana. as she got older and looked beautiful with ‘her’ iridescent blue feathers and plummage, we started to wonder. then we heard the crowing. it started when she was maybe 3 months old. realized it was a rooster and we only have a Mpls permit for 3 hens. he had to go. renamed her dodi fayed. no one wanted him… chicken rescue, u of m animal center, animal control, humane society.. we thought we were going to have to eat him (which made us kind of sad). then a friend emailed me about her friend that needed a rooster on his hobby farm in WI. the guy came to pick up dodi a few days later and dodi is still alive and well. a happy ending.