What To Do with Unwanted Roosters

Surprised by unwanted roosters in your flock? We've been there and we want you to know you have options, maybe even a few you haven't thought of. We're detailing each one in this post.

That time we bought 5 hens and 3 turned out to be roosters

First, how does one even get themselves in this sort of predicament. For us it started with a lot of excitement, an impulse buy of some cute Tractor Supply Chicks and high hopes for delicious eggs.

We knew going into our purchase that we should select "sexed" chickens, meaning chicks that had been pre-determined to be either female or male. We dutifully purchased our "female" chicks with full confidence in the abilities of the TSC staff.

Upon taking them home, we had no reason to suspect our birds were anything but promised: hens. As they aged, however, we began to notice little differences in their comb height, but chalked it up to individuality.

Time went on and the differences became clearer and clearer. Three of our our barred rocks looked distinctly alike and the two remaining chickens looked like eachother.

I groaned inwardly at the thought of doing all the work to raise our chickens only to have two of them actually produce eggs. A quick google search told me there was an 80% error rate for identifying sex of chicks.

I wish we got those odds.

Sure enough at 12 weeks, the three big combed, large "hens" started crowing and we knew for sure, they were roosters. Three out of five birds. ugh. why roosters might be unwanted

Why roosters might be unwanted

You might be asking yourself, but why not just keep the roosters? Ahh, well without sounding too grumbly, here are the facts:

Roosters crow, loudly, not once but three to upwards of five times a day

Multiply that by three roosters, and that's a lot of crowing. Plus, we never knew when they were going to crow each morning, sometimes it was at 7 am, sometimes at 4:30 am.

Roosters can be aggressive

Once roosters reach maturity they will compete for head honcho and they often become aggressive towards each other, towards kids and adults. They are, after-all, excellent protectors. We didn't want to host a cock fighting arena or have to fight them on our way to feeding the flock, so this was a big negative for us.

Roosters fertilize eggs

If your primary purpose for keeping chickens is eggs and not meat, then you probably don't want roosters fertilizing your hens. However, this doesn't have to be a problem, as long as you remove eggs daily and don't let hens roost on them, the eggs won't grow into a chick and are completely edible!

Roosters can overwork your hens

This was our primary drive for getting rid of roosters, combined with the issue of space and needing to get more hens to meet our egg needs. The ideal ratio of roosters to hens is about 1:8. Otherwise, the roosters may overbreed the hens (yikes) which can compromises their health. Since we only have 2 hens at this point, keeping even one rooster in the flock didn't make sense for us.

What to do with unwanted roosters

When it comes down to it you have four basic options for dealing with your unwanted roosters.

1. Keep them just long enough to hatch one round of chicks.
2. Move one or all to a different coop.
3. Process them for meat.
4. Sell them.

Let's talk about each option, and then we'll tell you what we decided to do.

Keep roosters just long enough to hatch chicks

If, like us, you feel short-handed on hens, you could keep your roosters just long enough to reach sexual maturity. At this point, (when you see them breeding with the hens), you can let them fertilize a few eggs, and either let your hens roost on the eggs or hatch them inside yourself (with young hens hatching the eggs yourself is often better).

After you have your new round of chicks, you can get rid of your roosters using one of the other options below.

One caveat, your brood of chicks are likely to be 50% roosters, so you'll have to decide what to do with those guys when it comes time too!

Move unwanted roosters to another coop

If you plan on growing your flock and/or you want to use roosters for meat, you could move your roosters to a separate coop, and either process them when they are full grown OR give each rooster his own set of 7 or 8 hens to watch over. If you do keep a rooster with your hens, you'll just want to make sure to remove and refrigerate your eggs daily, and don't allow your hens to roost on them. This will stop the growth cycle from taking place, squashing any chance of a chick.

Process your unwanted roosters for meat

Depending on the breed of bird you have, it might be worth it to you to process your roosters for meat. Ideally, you want to do this when the rooster first reaches maturity as older birds produce tougher meat. Look up your breed to determine when the best time is for processing.

For instance, our barred rocks are dual purpose birds, which means they're good egg producers and good meat birds. The ideal time to process them is about 18-22 weeks.

The timing was perfect for us to convert our roosters into Christmas dinner, but emotionally, we weren't able to commit. First, it's a lot of work killing, de-feathering, and processing a bird and we don't have the personal experience. Second, as our very first homestead animal purchase, we (and our kids) had grown a little attached. We asked our oldest his opinion and he gave a firm no to killing the birds (to my personal relief).

This isn't to say we won't ever process our own meat on the homestead in the future. But we didn't intend these birds for meat, we intended them for eggs!

If you do think processing the roosters is worth it maybe you have a lot of roosters, or you plan to raise chickens for meat in the future. Definitely do your research, and hopefully, find a friend/expert to walk you through your first time!

Sell your roosters

Finally, you have the option to sell your unwanted roosters or give them away to someone who needs them. Farmers with large flocks and those who breed chickens need roosters! There are a couple of ways to go about selling them.

First, you can look on Facebook for a local farm animal/equipment sale page and create a listing for your roosters there. Look at what other birds are selling for and list your birds at a comparable price, make sure to mention the age of your roosters if possible.

Second, you can ask around (or look around) for a neighbor/friend who already keeps a lot of chickens and reach out to them personally to see if they would want to buy the birds or possibly trade you chicks or hens for them. Of course, if you just want to give them away for free you can offer this as well.

Finally, you can search local auctions and flea markets that accept animals. We're fortunate enough to live in an agricultural-heavy community, so we were able to take our roosters to a monthly auction not far from our house. The whole process was very easy and we can't recommend selling at auction enough!

Here's how you do it.

Selling your roosters at auction

The first step to selling your roosters at auction is to check your local auction's website or call to whether you need to register your birds beforehand. For us, we simply had to show up on auction day with our roosters in cages before the allotted time for the animal sale (again, check with your local auction for this information).

Once there, we put our roosters next to the others, notified the attendant, grabbed a "buyers number" (yes, you need one even if you're actually a seller), and waited for the bidding to start.

As far as making a rooster cage goes, ours were fairly straight forward.

1. We took hardware mesh and folded it into a box/cage shape for the four sides of the cage, then connected the shape with zip-ties
2. Next, we cut out a square top and a square bottom for the cage out of the hardware mesh using pliers.
3. We zip-tied the bottom in place
4. Finally, we connected the top on one side only, and zip-tied the other sides once we put the roosters inside the cage.

In the end, we took two cages to auction, one held two roosters, and one cage held just one. At auction all three ended up going to the same couple, but we wanted to give people the option of buying just one at a time if necessary.

All-in-all our roosters sold for 22.50 a piece and we took home 54.00 of that (some goes to the auction). Not bad, in our opinion, considering we were going to give them away or eat them. The auction was definitely a good experience for us, and should we find ourselves in a similar predicament, we'll probably go the same route.

But can we all just say a collective prayer that the next bought of chicks are hens, as advertised? Thank you and amen.

For all you chicken owners, what have you done with your roosters? We'd love to hear in the comments below!

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