Something to Crow About?
Why having a rooster may be a good idea.
Why having a rooster may be a terrible idea.
And what to do with your rooster if it turns out to be a terrible idea.
Roosters are funny.
They can also be terrifying.
Meet Bret and Chet, two of my current roosters and future freezer meat.
If you raise chickens long enough you will no doubt experience the joys and/or heartaches of having one (or more) roosters in your coop, at least for a short while. Most backyard chicken keepers, especially if you raise them in the city, look to avoid this situation. The rooster isn’t always looked kindly upon and is often against the law to have. But, they can be a great addition to a flock and may even prove to be helpful -- or maybe just tasty.
My current flock rooster is Homer - a Gold Laced Wyandotte. He’s been a good fella so far and takes care of his ladies.
If you raise chicks from eggs you’ll have a 50% chance of getting a rooster. For this toss-up option, you’ll need fertilized eggs either from your own flock (so you’ll have to have a rooster already) or you can mail order eggs. I choose to mail order and raise around 200 chicks to sell as finished pullets every year and inevitably end up with at least one rooster each season. You can pay a bit more when you order and have the chicks sexed. While both the hatchery and I guarantee 100% accuracy (my customers can swap out a hen if they end up with a roo) and I’ve found that the ability of the hatchery to sex day-old chicks is amazingly accurate and it’s not an easy task. You can give it a try yourself if you like.
My first rooster experience didn’t go well. Not sure if he had a name but probably something like “Butthole”. I didn’t take any pictures of him. Every time I stepped into the coop he was running at me like I was about to strangle one of his ladies. I had to keep one boot ready to kick him off me repeatedly. Did I mention he was mean?
Well, not all roosters are mean, and if you want to try some training here is a guide that might help. Like any kind of baby, if you train it to know you and understand the value you bring to its life from an early age (i.e. food, water, safety), you’ll be in better shape to have a non-aggressive rooster. But it will be tough to overcome the heredity, hormones and the individual disposition of a rooster that can’t help but fight and often there’s not much you can do about it. My mean rooster would have been great for a free-ranging, farm situation but I didn’t have any luck giving him away so I poked him in the neck and buried him in the compost. Sorry, maybe that was mean. Not sure I’d do it differently now.
My second rooster was rough on the ladies. They were losing feathers where he mounted them and he pecked them on the head. Those were some rough looking hens. I was able to find him another home. Thankfully somebody wanted him!
A couple of seasons ago I ended up with a beautiful Silver Spangled Hamburg rooster I dubbed Milton (at right in repose). He was scared of me and not at all aggressive. Perfect! Roosters are almost always easy on the eyes and Milton was certainly no exception. For fun, I liked to imagine him with a pipe and smoking jacket. I admired him for his doting ways.
A rooster will point out anything tasty he finds to the nearest hen, a dance called “tidbitting”.
“Over here ladies! A tasty morsel I found just for you!” puff puff. Hens do it for their babies too - not necessarily the pipe smoking :)
A rooster will also try to protect the whole flock from daytime predators and shuffle them to a safe spot. That’s what they think they are doing when they attack you. I’ve also found that roosters don’t seem to eat as much as hens. So they do have their advantages.
Photo by Zosia Korcz on Unsplash
Let’s review the reasons why you might want to have a rooster:
Pretty to look at
Protection for the flock
Low input
Fertilized eggs
Nice to hear - from a distance - sometimes…
Photo by Sarah Halliday on Unsplash
And that brings us to the reasons why you may not want a rooster.
Other than an aggressive rooster, crowing is the primary negative, and that’s a pretty loud negative. Although they aren’t allowed in our city and I was waiting for a complaint, more than one of my neighbors actually told me how much they loved the sound of Milton throughout the day. (as an aside, I enjoyed this story about the fight over a rooster crowing in France). I’m sure I didn’t hear from my neighbors who didn’t like him so much, but those who did like him made me a bit more confident in my own ability to put up with him. Though a rooster crowing carries a lot of supernatural portents, historically speaking, I’m now happy to have one around despite the potential omens.
The crow doesn’t bother me so much when I’m not too close but a crow can be so loud even the roosters themselves block their own hearing when they are making their presence known. Roosters crow for more reasons than just to hear their own voices. They may sense a predator nearby, they may be unhappy and need food or water, they may be bored, they may feel threatened by other nearby roosters, or they may simply sense the oncoming light of day. Whatever the reason, stopping the crowing completely only happens with the knife-in-the-neck option. You can try to slow down the number of times they crow or try to make the crow from your rooster less loud with a crow collar. It didn’t work that great when I tried it. Here is how to make one for yourself.
So what if you end up with a rooster and don’t want it? You could try to find a home for your rooster. There are multiple Facebook groups that are specific to folks who want to sell, trade or giveaway anything related to chickens.
You can also “harvest” your rooster for meat. I’ll write later about the details of harvesting chickens but to describe a harvested rooster in as few words as possible: all legs and no breast. Seriously, I don’t know why I was shocked, but under all those fancy feathers is a lot of dark leg meat.
I ended up with five roosters one time. It was even my choice. It all began by going in on a small order of chicks with an acquaintance. Why not go for five cockerels? A couple of months later I had a cacophony of rooster in my yard. If I was nervous about having one rooster before, it’s nothing like five roosters.
I even had a brick thrown my way by a neighbor in protest. Yep, a brick. Summer, 2020, I hadn’t harvested chickens in a while. I hadn’t even touched a rooster in probably five years. So, I had some mental preparation to go along with the physical. When the time came for the first one it wasn’t quick and dirty. There is a lot of wattle to deal with and my hands were shaking. I don’t like killing things but it’s true that the more you do something uncomfortable the easier it gets. I had decided to dispatch 4 out of 5 (see Homer above) and by the fourth rooster, I was humming tunes as I went through all the motions. We roasted one and it ended up ok but not great. Our family seems to prefer white meat and there is very little white on a skinny boy chicken.
So to wrap this rooster roundup up, if you’re thinking about having a rooster in your flock, they can be helpful and even fun, but prepare yourself for crowing, potential aggression, and dark meaty legs.
~O~