Can you raise more than one rooster in your flock?

November 11, 2021 Bri Wyzard

Or will they kill each other?

I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people on my email list about keeping roosters together, and whether that’s possible or not.

Check out my video below for my full response.

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Some roosters can live together, no problem.

Check out my video above to see a video clip of two roosters living in harmony with a flock of 7 hens. This video clip comes from my email subscriber, Diana—Thanks, Diana!

However, Diana’s beautiful example isn’t the norm.

When roosters fight… What’s normal?

Check out my video above for some photos of two of my roosters, Perly and Rufio, after a big fight. You can see one of the photos in the video thumbnail—the gorgeous Perly.

Here’s what happened.

Rufio and Perly were my first roosters from my first batch of chicks about 4 years ago now. I still have them both. They started fighting a bit when they reached maturity at around 3-4 months. But the fights were only little scuffles and there were no injuries.

Eventually, Rufio came out as the dominant rooster and they stopped fighting. However, they never got along as friends, and they still don’t. Rufio didn’t allow Perly to be near him, and so Perly was still part of the flock and everything, and he would mate with hens when he got the chance, but he was always kind of on the outskirts.

And that’s totally normal.

How feral roosters interact in nature

That’s basically how feral chicken flocks work. There was a great study done on feral chickens in the 1960s, where they found that most chicken flocks have one dominant rooster, and then there are several other roosters who kind of live on the margins of the flock.

Those subordinate roosters help defend the flock. They help the hens to find good spots to nest, and they mate with the hens when the dominant rooster’s not in view. That’s typically how flocks run in the wild, and that’s how my flocks run.

My roosters aren’t friends, but they tolerate each other… usually.

But what about when roosters don’t tolerate each other?

Perly and Rufio got along fine until they were about two years old, and then Perly, who you’ll remember was the subordinate rooster, started challenging Rufio a lot.

Again, they were little skirmishes, so I wasn’t too worried about them. They weren’t really going at it. They were just kind of jumping at each other and posturing.

And then one morning, my husband went out to open the coop, and Rufio went sprinting out at top speed. He took off running, way over the hill and into the creek bed—and my chickens never go that far, not even close, so this was really unusual.

And then my husband saw that Perly was all bloody too in the coop. He checked him over and he was fine. It was all surficial stuff.

He then tried to find Rufio but he couldn’t—our creek bed is just thick with bristly bushes that are totally impenetrable to us, so if a chicken goes in there, we can’t find him. But our chickens never go down there, so it hadn’t been a problem till now.

So I went out to try to find Rufio, and he came out when I called to him, because he’s bonded to me, and he trusts me. And I checked him over. He was okay, thank god.

So what probably happened here was Perly and Rufio got in one of their little fights, but there wasn’t enough room for the loser—in this case, Rufio—to get away. Because remember, they were locked in the coop. And so Rufio likely tried to get away, but probably got pushed in a corner or something in the coop, and got beat up.

And so there’s lesson number 1 about keeping more than one rooster together. If you’re keeping them in a confined space, where the losing rooster can’t get away, he could die.

And so, if you have a really large backyard or your roosters are free-range like mine, your roosters are in a much better position.

But what if you only have a confined space?

If you have a much smaller setup, you’re gonna need to be really, really careful about keeping more than one rooster.

So, as they come to maturity, you’ll need to keep a really close eye on them. You might even want to keep a baby monitor in the coop, if you’re at home, so if they’re fighting, you can do something. And you’ll need to have some sort of plan for what to do if your roosters don’t get along.

So, a few ideas.

#1 You can separate the roosters into 2 different flocks.

Or you can have one rooster with your hens and then a bachelor flock kept separately that’s just roosters. But if you’re low on space, that’s not so helpful.

#2 You can work on training your roosters to live peacefully together.

This can be done but it does take a lot of time and patience, and you will need to separate the roosters when you’re not working with them to protect them from each other when you’re not there.

And I’m actually going to talk about this training approach in an upcoming video very soon. Stay tuned!

#3 Get rid of one (or more) of your roosters.

So, you can kill him or rehome him and those are really your only options, and it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to rehome him.

People don’t want roosters. The people who do want a rooster already have one and they don’t want more for the same reason you don’t.

Sometimes you can get lucky and find someone you know, and you might even have a sanctuary nearby to take him in, but that’s very uncommon. So you’re probably looking at killing him if you’re not able to separate him or train him. That’s just the reality of it, unfortunately.

Did Perly and Rufio ever work out their differences?

So, let me go back to Perly and Rufio here.

After this terrible fight, Rufio was too scared to go near the flock again, and so I ended up housing him in another coop at night. He had his own little coop for a while. I hung a Sweeter Heater in there so he wouldn’t get cold.

So, you’ll need to think about that. Maybe you can house your rooster in the garage at night, or maybe you have a dog cage or something and you can keep him in your house at night, but if you have roosters fighting the way Perly and Rufio were, you cannot lock them in the same coop.

Back to my story. Rufio stayed very far from the flock for a few days, and then he slowly started to come closer and closer. Initially, Perly would run him off, but then he started tolerating him more and more, and then after a couple of weeks, things went pretty much back to normal.

Rufio had integrated himself back into the flock, and the only thing that had changed was that Perly was now the dominant rooster, and that’s how it is today.

Perly lives with Rufio and also a 3rd rooster, a rescue named Quiggles, who actually slowly integrated himself into the flock over a period of a few months. At first, he stayed far away from them, and then he slowly got closer over time, until he was finally accepted by the roosters.

So, all this worked out in this flock of mine. But a big part of the reason it worked out was because they have so much space, so they were able to work things out the same way they would in the wild.

Rooster fights in the wild vs. your backyard

That’s another thing about that paper I told you about where they studied feral chickens living on an island in the 1960s. Well, that same research group also trapped a bunch of these feral chickens and then raised them in captivity to study them further.

And there’s this one really horrible story they tell about a rooster fight and how one rooster ends up getting really brutally killed. It was a heartbreaking story. I cried when I read the details of this encounter.

But the researchers’ commented on this episode that they’d never seen anything like that in all of their time studying roosters in the wild. They’d never seen that kind of fight. And they believed that this is because roosters in the wild have space to escape, whereas this poor confined rooster could not get away when he started really losing this fight.

So I hope that helps you better understand rooster behavior and rooster fighting.

The final word on keeping multiple roosters

And so, can you keep multiple roosters in your flock?

The answer is maybe, and I know that’s a horrible answer. That’s not helpful. Nobody likes it, but it really does depend on the temperament of your roosters and it also depends on how much space you have.

In my flock, Rufio, Perly, and Quiggles can live together because they have space to run away when they’re losing a fight. I could not house them in a confined area without training them, at least not during mating season.

However, you really can train roosters to live together if you have the time, patience, and motivation. I’ll be releasing a video on exactly how to do that soon.

UPDATE: The video (and blog post) on training roosters to get along is now here - How to get your roosters to stop fighting each other in 4 simple steps.

train-roosters-to-stop-fighting

Sources

McBride, G., Parer, I., and Foenander, F., “The social organization and behavior of the feral domestic fowl.” Animal Behaviour Monographs, v. 2, no. 3, 1969, p. 125-181.

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