How to repair your relationship with your rooster after you've wronged him
I recently received this question from one of my email subscribers:
“I deliberately got a friendly frizzle roo who was great with me indoors but when I put him in the coop with my hens, he wanted nothing to do with me.
The lady I got him from said I should push it and so I'd catch him and he hated it and me. I suppose it is too late for us, right?”
It’s never too late to repair your relationship with your rooster! See my full response in the video below:
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When my loving rooster lost interest in me
It’s never too late to improve your relationship with your rooster.
However, he might not ever be as cuddly as you want, and that’s not because you’ve ruined him by trying to make him cuddle when he didn’t want to—that’s always repairable. It’s because sometimes roosters are so enamored with their hens and they take their role as caretaker so seriously that they’re just never gonna be that into you again.
This actually happened to me once too. I rescued a rooster, Champ, who’d been abandoned on the highway. He was super sweet, treated me like a queen, constantly followed me and tidbitted, and talked to me in this happy little voice nonstop.
Champ would even invite me to dustbathe with him through tidbitting and vigorous motions. He’d do the same when he was foraging, sunbathing, or really anything—he’d invite me, and even though he was uncomfortable with being touched, and he wouldn’t let anyone else near him, he would allow me to pick him up because he wanted to please me.
And then I got Champ some hens and everything changed.
He acted like I didn’t exist and he just had no interest in me at all. He’d come see me and call the hens to follow him if he thought I might have a treat for them. But that means even that interaction was for the hens’ benefit, and not for mine, or his, for that matter.
And Champ still trusted me and would still let me pick him up if I needed to check him over or anything, and we’d still kind of have conversations with our eyes. He was the best at eye contact, but he just wasn’t excited about seeing me anymore, no longer followed me around, no longer invited me to do things with him, and he just didn’t care one way or the other if I was there or not.
I always hoped that once he got old, I’d coax him into being a snuggle rooster, but he did pass away last week in a quite gruesome matter actually. I’ll be posting a video on that, a cautionary tale.
But my point is, your rooster might be how my Champ was, and just be too focused on the hens to care about you.
Roosters tend to get sweeter with age
However, it does sound like he’s young, and I have found that all of my chickens tend to get sweeter as they get older, and I really notice a difference in their behavior around a year or a year and a half. They settle down a lot, so it may be that he will get sweeter again.
Two ways to repair your relationship with your roosterand gain trust
But there are a couple of things you can do.
Spend time with the flock
First—and I definitely suggest you do this—just spend a lot of time sitting with your flock. I like to use one of these ground-level chairs, and I just sit there and I watch my chickens, and I let them interact with me as they please, I never force them to get on my lap or come near me or anything, I just let them decide, and they learn to trust you that way.
And if you do that even for just 10 minutes a day, you might find that your rooster will warm up to you again.
Train your rooster with positive dog training methods
The second thing you might want to try—or you might not—is a more active approach, where you train him to be more snuggly with positive dog training methods. This might not be for you, but I’ll share it with you and you can decide.
So, for this to work, you would need to separate your rooster from the hens, and so I would suggest, first thing in the morning, you leave your hens locked up in the coop and you just take your rooster out.
And he might scream bloody murder at first when you pick him up from the coop—and if that’s the case, you can either put him down as quickly as possible, just keep that involuntary holding as short as you possibly can. Or, you can hold him for a minute until he stops struggling, and then give him a little treat, so he associates not struggling with getting a treat. You could either route.
I would probably go the first route and just set him down as quickly as possible. I think as he gets used to being picked up every morning, he’s likely to stop struggling because he expects it and it’s no longer shocking to him and he’ll hopefully like what comes next and associate being picked up with good things.
So what comes next? Next, you just spend some time with him with either some chicken feed—and you’ll want to make sure you don’t have other chicken feed available for him when you do this—or you can use treats, like mealworms or scrambled eggs or something, just make sure you don’t feed him too many treats.
And what you’ll do is you’ll work on getting him first to eat out of your outstretched hand. If he won’t do that, you can put the food as near to you as he’ll allow and then you’ll progressively get closer to that food until you can get him to eat out of your hand.
And then he’ll eventually start to move closer and closer to you, and you can eventually—with that food—kind of coax him onto your lap – you can sit on the ground, hold it on the other side of you (the side furthest from him) or hold it up a little bit high.
Or—or maybe I should say “and/or”—you can train him to be petted if that’s what you want.
So when he’s near you, you’ll first raise your hand, and he might instinctively jump away from that, so keep it raised and when he approaches, let him have a bite of food.
And you do that over and over until he’s habituated to you holding your hand up and he no longer jumps.
Then, you work on bringing your hand closer to him, just baby steps closer, and again he’ll jump back, and you wait till he gets close, and give him a treat for approaching again, and just keep working on that.
And finally, you get close enough to touch him, and lastly, to pet him.
How long does training take?
And I know I’m going through this really fast, but this process can take several weeks. So, you’re not going to be able to train him to not jump when you lift your arm and to let him touch you in the same session. Even just getting him to let you lift your arm towards him without him jumping could take days or longer.
This really is a baby steps kind of training and he will determine the pace that you can go. He could learn really, really fast, but more often than not, training is a very long-term process.
And if you’re interested in trying that, then I suggest you work on this training—again, just starting with getting him to eat from your hand—work on it 10 minutes every morning or so, even just 5 minutes starting out. You want to always end on a good note, so you want to end the training session before he gets frustrated or distracted, and 5 minutes may be enough for him.
And also be very patient at first because he might not like being separated from the hens at first, and he may have a hard time focusing, so give him a few days to get used to that if you need to.
But that’s my suggestion if you want to take an active role
However, if that doesn’t sound like fun to you, then my advice would be not to do it, because your rooster will pick up on that (you being aggravated), and you’re gonna have a hard time.
And really, if you just spend 10 minutes a day or more sitting with your flock, you’re likely to make some progress with him then too.
And once again, he may just get sweeter again with age.
Best of luck!