There is no such thing as a FREE chicken!

Alright everyone, so just throwing this out there, there is no such thing as a free chicken.

One thing that my husband and I do is pick up free chickens to add genetic diversity to our flock. Honestly they are not that hard to find. Either they are people in a subdivision who learned that chickens aren't allowed (that is how we got our silkies) or they are getting to old to deal with chickens.

This leads us to today.

As we were delivering our eggs to a regular, he mentioned that his neighbor was looking at getting rid of their chickens. Always looking for a way to expand the flock, Kyle eagerly jumped at the opprotunity.

I called them and they said that they had 2 older hens and 4 pullets. There was a catch though, they also had 7 cockerels, and it was an all or none situation.

Now, roosters are not always bad. They actually can be a source of many a meal. I highly recommend butchering roosters, and even butchering your own. I like knowing that my roosters had a good, happy life before slaughter, which some of the store-bought chickens may or may not have had.

However, there were 7. And they were not housed together. This means that they will fight! A lot of roosters who are raised together do not do this, they will work out their pecking order while they are young and still "play fighting", often an older rooster will break it up before it gets too bad. SO.. now I have 7 fighting cocks. Oh Lordy!

So, having not planned on keeping all the cockerels separate, having never had to with my own, I did not have 7 different enclosures. So needless to say, the original owner put them all in the same box for transport. It was a terrible idea! They fought the entire way home! Many of the roosters now have very bad lacerations and are shocky. Hopefully, they will make it through the night. We set up a large coop for them and turned them loose in the acre large horse pasture to "free range". There is a perimeter fence to protect against unwanted predators and the extra space will help prevent fighting. Most roosters would naturally run instead of staying and fighting. So, the fighting has stopped and we will see how things go.

So rules for today:

There is no such thing as a free chicken.

Raise all your cockerels together from hatching to establish a pecking order early.

Cull aggressive ones early.