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Comment by cco | Hacker News Reader

>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!

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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.

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.

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.

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!

Adapted? No.

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

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

>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?

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.

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