I’ve used a hose to try and drown a meaner-than-hell rooster a handful of times. Or a spray bottle with a hearty nozzle on it set to stream (fast fingers FAST FINGERS).
Overall, for me personally, I’m in jeans. It doesn’t hurt when he flogs (again, my rooster experience may differ from yours). I just ignored them for the most part.
Now, the one that would roost up high and flog your face? He met an untimely demise.
Just kill him or give him away. you won’t train him. They can’t be taught.
Sounds like a great time to find out what “Aggressive” tastes like. :winkgrin:
As kids, Mom got us 3 kids a batch of Easter chicks and they all grew up to be white leghorn roosters. They got to where they thought it was great sport to wait on us to come up the driveway from the getting off the school bus and chase and spurs us. They all tasted great in the Brunswick stew. 
A mean rooster is going to be stew regardless. Giving him away won’t change that, even with hens. No one wants that. If you don’t want to butcher him yourself, that’s fine, but don’t expect whoever takes him to have that same inhibition!
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I just sic the Corgis on them. Corgis love to chase things. I get my work done in the barn and the rooster keeps the Corgis busy.
Had an aggressive rooster. Carried a big stick and when I heard the chithead coming at me from behind I would turn around and smack him. Final straw was when went after the dog (110 Pyranese). He quickly got a good dose of lead poisoning.
The barn I board at has an aggressive rooster. He’s a pain in the butt, he will stalk you and attack from behind. Apparently he spurred through a boarder’s pants last year and drew blood 😮 then he bit a kid another time. I don’t understand why anyone would keep an aggressive rooster. It is such a hassle and stressful.
This one has some offspring growing up this year, hopefully they won’t be so wicked.
I feel so lucky-- in ~10 years of chicken-keeping I have not had a single aggressive roo. I often wonder what makes them nice, it’s not like we go out of our way to handle our chickens when they’re young or anything. Regardless, if/when our luck runs out, I would for sure not keep the roo around, though – he’d meet my friend Dr. 22. No room on our farm for any animal that deliberately goes after the hoomanz. Nice roosters protect the flock just as well.
Sometimes they only get weird when one of their hens gets broody. Broody hens are rare because the chicken industry just about bred that out of chickens. If you get one, your rooster may get more aggressive to protect her. You might need to keep them locked up in a chicken yard until the chicks hatch.
Roos have also lost a lot of natural behaviors. Most roosters just jump on their hens without dancing first. I only keep a rooster that dances and gets the hens to squat down for him. Even hens deserve a little romance, lol. No ‘rapist’ roosters on our farm because you can see how much it stresses the hens. Dr. Grandin wrote about rapist roosters in one of her books. She is absolutely right. What a shame. If your roo dances for his ladies, keep him. We need to keep that from fading entirely. The hens are much happier with a polite rooster.
Thanks I don’t think he dances. I take the eggs everyday, so he won’t be having offspring. BTW I love Dr. Grandin too.
Sometimes their dances are really short; just a quick downward wing flap and a couple of skips, but if the hens squat down, they are accepting of him. If he jumps on them and makes them squawk, he’s not being polite.
I wonder how extensive the rooster dance used to be? Most male birds do displays for potential mates. It took a long time for this behavior to evolve. It’s sad that we’ve almost extinguished it in a relatively short time.
Okay, I’m going to bore you with geekiness now…
The closest wild relatives are the junglefowl of Asia (Thailand has several varieties). What is fascinating is that what we see as a brief mating dance in domestic chickens, is something different in their wild cousins. It’s a dance to say food is over here. Both wild junglefowl and domestic roosters make a specific chuckling sort of noise to call hens over for a tasty morsel, but only wild fowl couple the noise with a dance move. Even wild hens do the dance and make the sound to tell their chicks there is something tasty right here. Our domestic roosters just make the noise and sometimes do the dance, but not necessarily at the same time. The dance is a precursor to mating. Have our domestic roosters just learned to expect a little nookie if they find tasty morsels?
We had a wonderful half polish rooster who was very polite with his hens, made a great fuss about showing them food, and one day he attacked me. I am so lucky I had on blue jeans. He bruised the heck out of my thigh and one spur left quite a streak. After a couple of attacks I gave him away. I don’t care what happened to him. I hated it on one hand but oh well. Now I have 3 barred rock hens with no roo and two belgian d’uccle hens with a pissy roo. He’s too small to be a hazard and is only fussy near his coop. Out in the barnyard he’s fine. He dances for his hens and chuckles to them about yummy food.
I think there is a way to trim the spurs at a young age. Makes them less dangerous.
My two Polish roosters attacked and flogged the heck out of me one evening while I was feeding them…they were in a neighbors soup pot the next day!! They WILL/CAN hurt you. No retraining has been successful to my knowledge!!
this is exactly the situation coq au vin was developed for…
They can be rehabilitated to ignore or tolerate your presence, but if you don’t want to go that route I totally support the coq au vin comment - it can be a lot of work and no one wants to get speared by a roo spur.
Handle them daily, multiple times a day.
No physical retaliation. It makes them more aggressive.
Feed them meal worms by hand at dusk right before they get sleepy.
Hens are very helpful for teaching a roo to tolerate your presence; pick your most friendly, food-motivated one and start to feed her by hand with the roo near. Eventually he’ll want in on it too.
I’m doing this with an aggressive roo right now. He also is way more aggressive if there are brooding hens. Not much of a dancer, though… So sad, in the nearly 15 years of taking care of chickens I’ve never seen one dance. They’ve all be rapist roosters and it’s one of the things I dislike most about roosters.
I wish my roo would read this and do this.
I have one hen who runs right up to me to be fed. I will hold an apple slice or worms in my hand and she eats away.
When she is done eating I stand back up to go about life and then Mr. Rooster decides I need to be attacked.
He stood there and watcher her eat. He is welcome to come eat too (she is the only one brave enough to eat, one of the other hens is close enough to eat but just not brave enough to take anything - there are only four hens and one rooster).
I have a theory that boy birds obtained from breeders are generally nicer to people than boy birds obtained by hatcheries. Figure that “regular” people who are breeding to standard or breeding for egg color or just breeding nice barnyard mixes don’t tolerate a whole lot of jerky behavior, but hatcheries are really just looking for production.
If you want a nice boy, it might be worth contacting a local person who is working with whatever breed you like. There are usually plenty of roosters to go around :lol:
Thanks Simkie. I didn’t want a boy at all. 3 of the 6 polish chicks bought a year ago turned out to be roos.
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