Originally Posted By: Driftin'
Roos: If you've got the space for one and have at least 10 hens, they are the best early warning system for your flock. While their girls a beaks down/butts up eating, a roo is ever-vigilant, watching. Any threat will be forewarned with a Bruce Lee shout, allowing the girls a chance to get under trees/shrubs. A good one will take food from your hand and give it to his girls rather than partake himself and not be a serial rapist. Their absence is palpable after having them as part of your flock. Getting a good one requires effort from the get go. I handle ours every day from the time they start to show a larger comb as chicks. If they get uppity, they get laid on their side and pinned with my fingers at their neck and sides, pecking them with an finger like a dominant roo would do in a fight. They're legs/feet will curl up and shiver into a submissive state. Stand up slowly after about 5 minutes and they will oft stay there for a spell before bouncing up. Like all animals, you are either dominant or submissive in their eyes. Seems like Salmo was the latter.... *grin*


Driftin', now you tell me! This all happened back in the 1960s, but I'm a bit surprised that our Vo Ag teacher didn't learn me about this way of dealing with the roos. He just taught us to leave 'em be until they were 8 to 10 weeks old and then turn them into fryer chickens. Anyway, I think I understood in those long gone days about dominant and submissive regarding livestock like cattle, but I must have been slow on the uptake when it came to poultry. But now I recollect a story from those days that you guys might enjoy. For a few years from junior high and high school I was quite the young farmer. I had 5 or 6 milk cows in those days and sold cream to Darigold down in Chehalis. I kept dairy stock and chickens, but it seemed like we had a steady stream of critters coming and going at our little stump ranch. Somehow a red rooster was living large, free of the chicken coop, and roaming around the barn or wherever he darn well pleased. He grew very large and became quite aggressive. He was a sneaky bastard as well. His favorite trick was to sneak up behind me while I was milking one of my cows and jump up on my back and start raking with his spurs. As you might imagine, the first few times this happened it startled the bejabbers out of me and occasionally resulted in some spilt milk. That pissed me off since I already wasn't making any real money in this enterprise to begin with. It happened to my younger step-brother a couple times as well.

So that was it. My step-brother and his buddy determined that the tall red rooster's days were numbered. While we were up at the barn they found this old meat cleaver from who knows where, and the sharp edge of that thing must have been as dull as the back side of my hunting knife. So the two boys commenced chasing that rooster around the barn, the corral, the barn yard, and back in the barn before finally cornering that poor bird. I was already bent over laughing and then they took that bird to the chopping block and whacked away at his neck a couple of dozen times trying to sever its head off with what had to be the dullest cleaver in the universe. I might have felt sorry if it had been any other chicken, but we were happy to see the meanest nastiest rooster I'd ever seen finally dead at last. It was a rangy and stringy old bird, and my mom couldn't do anything with it except make some chicken stock. But my step-brother and I felt extra satisfied turning that sumbitch into something useful after all the sneak attacks. And peace and tranquility returned to the milking parlor. Although now that I think about it, one of those 6 cows was a really mean Jersey bitch, but that would be another story . . . Those were the days . . .