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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

I had a small flock of about 50 cockerels two years ago. And the bullying issue made me swear never to raise cockerels again. They were petty, jealous, constantly fighting, noisy and downright nosy.

The big shots would peck any insolent runt who tried to steal a bite. They'd sit down to relax after they'd had their fill but still wouldn't allow the smaller birds to feed. I lost quite a number to pecking injuries and outright starvation - in a cage filled with food.

I however enjoyed turning the bullies into the bullied by isolating them for a few days and reintroducing them.

Broilers on the other hand were a joy to own. All they cared for was food, water and a clean, dry spot to rest. It's a pity they shit too much.

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>50 cockerels

You recreated the chicken version of an American prison, no where in nature would you find a gathering of 50 male chickens in tight living quarters. They, and humans, aren't built for that sort of living situation and it is unsurprising that behavioral problems materialize.

My favorite flock composition was a base of all female birds, add in a cockerel and see how he and the hens interact. If you find a good match leave him there and then as new male chickens are born watch how they interact with the current cockerel. Sometimes they get along fine with each other and you can leave them, other times they go at each other like mad and then I'd usually kill the younger male. I never liked broilers because _all_ they liked was food, they were just so boring! I like curious chickens!

Yeah. I mean, what do you expect to happen when you put a bunch of animals in a social and physical environment they are not well-adapted to? It's humans who are the bullies.

I can't imagine that modern chickens aren't well adapted to coop life. We've been raising them that way for quite a few millenia now. And look how, for example, dogs have evolved from wolves in the same time frame. At any rate, my mother raises chickens and tried to raise them free range (with full access to 3 or 4 acres) for a while, but she would lose them constantly to coyotes. I think that nowadays, chickens are ill-adapted for the wild.

Dog domestication is possibly at 40kya or so, so in that case much different than the rest of domestication events.

I assume chickens don't live as long as dogs though, right? If that's the case, presumably chickens go through a larger number of generations per unit of time

Chickens don't have natural selection. They are bed for fatness.

Neither did dogs. Suffice to say Wolves don't become Chihuahuas in 40k years without some very artificial selection.

Pretty remarkable how short a period can create some monstrously different creatures, even if they are still technically sexually compatible - not that I think a wolfhuahua would be a good idea!

It depends on the confinement, the overcrowding of industrial production may be unadaptable. There are still enough instincts programmed that unfamiliar males would rather avoid each other.

I do not beleive that industrial breeding is selecting for anything that makes such prison life tolerable. Birds in production generally aren't reproducing, so nothing in the henhouse is affecting evolution.

That’s preposterous. There’s no way chickens with the best adaptation are the ones being bread; they’re in cages. Selective breeding could’ve easily developed a selection bias of large chickens that are obscenely aggressive and fight their confines.

Large chickens have certainly been bred for but this is part of the reason modern domesticated chickens are ill suited for wild life: they are too fat and too slow besides being flightless. Hens in particular have no natural defenses against predators.

I can't believe this even needs mentioning, but the life of a factory-farmed chicken today is entirely different from the life of a chicken even a hundred years ago, never mind a thousand. A coop of a dozen chickens at most definitely does not have similar behavioral problems as a vast hall housing a hundred thousand individuals.

Adapted? No.

But modified? Yes. They trim their beaks and claws.

Edit: See https://countrysidenetwork.com/daily/poultry/feed-health/tri...

Even with my free range birds, the roosters will fight until they establish a hierarchy. I've had some lost to predators, and when I raise up a couple of young ones, the fights will start all over again. I've never lost a bird to fighting injuries, but they can be quite brutal to each other.

I only ever lost one male to male-male fighting. Lost quite a few more with the hens as the aggressors.

>50 cockerels You recreated the chicken version of an American prison, no where in nature would you find a gathering of 50 male chickens in tight living quarters.

Is it only American prisons that hold males in tight quarters?

>I however enjoyed turning the bullies into the bullied by isolating them for a few days and reintroducing them.

That reminds me of the story of a baboon tribe Robert Sapolsky studied:

"The males [...] had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387823/

I wonder if a similar phenomenon would occur within a flock such as yours (or within chickens altogether)

The critical point of that story was that it was not random which baboon died. The garbage dump area which had the infected food "belonged" to an other baboon squad, so it was only the most aggressive males that dared to invade in order to eat there. Naturally the troop overall got less aggressive when the top 50% most aggressive males died.

What was surprising to Sapolsky and scientific notable was that the lower aggression continued even when the troop returned to the original gender composition several years later, including new males which had no genetic relatives with the troop. The theory is that a culture of low aggression was introduced by the eradication of the aggressive males, and new males simply adapted to that culture when they joined.

If they made both genetic and environmental/cultural arguments for the same effect, they had no idea why and were making up just so stories

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