[aaronbaugher]

Pretty much. Small-time chicken owner here. The best ratio of hens to roosters is about 10-to-1. Each rooster will have his "harem" of hens that keep him busy, and the hens will be content. Any more roosters than that and they'll fight a lot, and the roosters that don't have their own group of hens will hang around the others looking for a chance to rape them while their regular rooster is occupied or too far away. It can be pretty hard on the hens.

I've never had a rooster kill hens, though. Each other, sure, but not the hens. I don't really buy that.

Some context for this article that most people don't know: there are chicken breeds for meat (Cornish Cross, mostly) and breeds for eggs. The egg breeds are skinny and won't become a good meat bird no matter how much you feed them. I guess you can caponize them and they'll gain more weight, but that's a process that costs money. You could use them for soup, but that probably wouldn't be cost-effective either, so that's why the large-scale operations just kill them.

[zahlman]

> The best ratio of hens to roosters is about 10-to-1. Each rooster will have his "harem" of hens that keep him busy, and the hens will be content. Any more roosters than that and they'll fight a lot, and the roosters that don't have their own group of hens will hang around the others looking for a chance to rape them while their regular rooster is occupied or too far away. It can be pretty hard on the hens.

It seems like a sick joke of nature that a species that behaves this way wouldn't also naturally be born in a similar ratio. I wonder if they're like that in the wild, too....

[grues-dinner]

There's no real such thing as a "natural" chicken, but their ancestors, red junglefowl, are similar. In fact, healthier females produce more males (https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/119/3/840/5561973). Perhaps it's evolutionary turned out to be good for fitness of the species if 90% of the males are killed by other males or otherwise don't mate and that outweighs "wasting" 4.5/10 eggs. Nature doesn't "care" (yes, yes, active verb for non-conscious process) if it's pretty, just that it works.

In general, life in nature just ain't that fun as a junior member of an r-selected species, which includes chickens.