Chicken or rooster, there is a question. Even though many think that a life of a rooster is a happy one, considering to take care of 15 hens, it is not always so. The perfect 15 to 1 life is, for some roasters, a great life, but considering the fact that there is an equal number of hens and roosters hatch out of eggs in a year, this would mean that 14 out of 15 rosters are not living the harem like life.
It is known that throughout the history that some chicken were prized as layer chickens and some as meat chicken, but they could usually use for both. Roosters in the other hand would be butchered once they began crowing, or castrated and fed for a year to finish on a table, or raised to be roosters and live a harem like life.
But not many roosters have the opportunity to act out or service a crow. On modern egg farms, male chicks are killed at birth. This trend didn’t start until the early 1990’s, when the ability to say whether a young chick is a male or a female, was developed. In 1919, there was a crossbreed that could tell us the chick’s sex by the colour of its own, but only the first crossbreed generation was sexed.
In 1927, a Japanese poultry specialist changed the chicken industry he unveiled the vent method. This method enabled that one-day-old chick is sexed with 95 percent accuracy. Many chick-sexing schools opened. Even though chick-sexing was a viable and well-compensated profession, the vent method was a very tricky and difficult and not many were able to become professionals.
This brought to a poor fortune of roosters as now farmers didn’t have to feed roosters to the age where they were identified as male. Now the industry was creating one-purpose chickens and there was no longer a need for farmers to feed them for several weeks.
For those who are keeping backyard-chicken, it is difficult to have a rooster, even if they accidentally slip into the flock. Many people take a good care of their roosters but they have to respect the city rules and also neighbors. Yet there are those who let their rooster to roam around the neighborhood, so roosters can be found on the streets, or some might set them off to the recycling centers or zoos. As rosters are very, very difficult to catch, people are advised to try to lure them into their garages so they can be easily captured.
Nowadays, a 15-to-1 hen-to-rooster idea could be just a myth, as for many rosters that are commercially born and raised, don’t even know, the roster courtship dance. When doing this dance, roster comes near a hen, drops one wing and dance around in a circle. Then hers see the dance and sit to mate. The dance is instinctual, but this rooster is unfamiliar with it, therefore are shunned by their hen folk, and usually, go mad.
