Earlier this week my neighbor's dog killed one of my chickens. I sent the beast off to doggie jail for a night and then calmed down and decided not to pursue further fines or penalties (the law here says that the dog owner is responsible for restraining the animal).
Anyway, my neighbor's wife just dropped off three young chickens as compensation, which was a very nice and much appreciated gesture. We'd already picked up a couple of very young chicks to replace the dead one (my daughter was quite attached to it and was hysterical for days), and really hadn't expected anything else.
Anyway, we now have these new chickens, and unfortunatly I think that two of them are roosters - the dead chicken was a hen and I believe that one of the new ones is indeed a hen. All of our current chickens are hens, except for one little banty that is a rooster (the dead chicken was his mate). These new ones (don't know the breed - but they're going to be big 'uns) look like they have been pecked quite a bit and are missing feathers on their backs.
Should I keep them separate? We aren't really set up to do so, unfortunately. I don't think that disease will be an issue, as I know the person that bred the newcomers and he breds championship grade birds. But I don't want my little flock to start fighting.
This is really a hard one, especially with that few birds. We've had very poor results when integrating flocks when there was a size difference UNLESS the two flocks were of approximately equal size.
There is some advice on our Chicken Page you might want to take a look at. Our most recent success involved raising chicks till they were about as tall as (but not as meaty as) the older birds, then putting the smaller ones inside a pen within the larger chicken pen, and after a week letting the two flocks blend. But they refused to blend. So one night while the older birds were in the coop sleeping we scooped up the young birds and heaved them inside. There they remained for two full days, but now the young and old birds are mingling well. This was the FIRST time we've not had fatalities. Oh, BTW, the young cockerels are still in the isolation pen so they don't beat up my wife's beloved banty roosters.
Yeah, this one could be a bit rough. I'll keep you posted - but I've also heard that just throwing them in can be effective. The good news is that the chickens we've had for a while (and the ones we like - especially my daughter [img]/forums/images/icons/wink.gif[/img]) are bigger, even the banty rooster.
Figure if it comes down to "them or us", the ones we've had are going to be the winners, sez I [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img].
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