Are the chickens we eat exclusively female, or do we eat roosters too?
You mean do we eat cock?
The term for a gelded rooster is a capon. It is eaten, but not that commonly (though it is supposed to be extra specially delicious). The flesh of unaltered roosters is tough and stringy.
Your name is egghead and you don’t know 
?
It’s my understanding we eat more er…cock than we do otherwise. Male chickens go directly to slaughter whereas females may be kept around for egg production. After which they’re probably not sold as regular roasting chickens as they would be, well, tough old birds.
I’m curious now, how common are roosters compared to chickens.
Are they like lions where there’s only one or two breading males per pride, or flock, or whatever.
If so are young roosters killed by their older, more vital rivals until a new one comes along?
In films, you always see rows and rows of chickens laying eggs or cackling around the barn yard, but it’s always the lone rooster you see crowing at dawn.
I’ve never lived on a farm, so I wouldn’t know
Only one rooster is need for umpteen many hens, that is, if you need the rooster to have the eggs be fertile and make more baby chicks. If you are just going to produce and sell (or use) eggs, you don’t even need the one rooster.
In production, baby chicks are sexed and sold as straight run (approx 50/50, just as they hatch) if you will be eating them young or you order all females if you want eggs only.
You can have more than one rooster, depending on the size of your henhouse but fighting happens until it is established who is “cock of the walk.”
Many, maybe even most, of the “broiler-fryer” chickens in the stores are the unaltered males, slaughtered young when they are still tender.
Don’t be fooled by the term “chicken breasts.”
Chickens raised for meat are straight run, 50-50 male and female. Chickens raised for eggs are a little different. The females are kept for egg production, the males are slaughtered as soon as they reach maturity. When the females get too old and start to slow down they are slaughtered as well, but are typically sold to the food industry rather than fresh. These are stewing chickens, they are made into broth, hot dogs, dog food, etc.
The reason you have only a few roosters compared to hens on farms is that farmers do the same thing. You slaughter almost all roosters at maturity but keep as many hens as you want for eggs. The roosters WOULD try to kill each other, sure, but you eat them before they have the chance too. If you let chickens revert to the wild, one rooster will establish himself as boss and chase away all the other roosters, until an even tougher rooster comes along and kicks his ass in turn.
Different breeds of chickens are used for egg production than for meat. (Making certain simplifications). When I was young, I worked at a hatchery where we only dealt in “egg production” chickens (layers, as we called them). Every hatch day, we’d hatch 40,000 chicks. Approximately half of them were, of course, roosters. All the roosters were dumped into plastic bags, suffocated, and thrown away. There was no market for them, since layers don’t need roosters to produce eggs, (we got our breeder roosters and hens from headquarters) and for the meat market, “meat production” chickens (broilers) were what was wanted. Creeped me out slightly at the time, and more so over the years.
Thanks all, I think my question has been answered.
Of course we’ve all heard of cock fights.
And those roosters aren’t chicken!
I had the pleasure of eating Capon two or three times during the course of my job at a decorating magazine (we also had a food dept. for recipes, etc.). I can attest to the fact that it is most excellent. Juicier, more savory, most likely loaded with fat as compared to ordinary chicken.
You’re not kidding about the males from egg producing breeds being fairly worthless for eating. Quite scrawny and a lot of work for not much meat.
The cock fighting remarks reminded me of the chickens we had from someone who gave up fighting them (I suspect). Very smart for chickens and more of the females were good mothers. Our layers just plopped eggs down any old place and wandered off, rarely nesting. If shooed from the nest they gave a squawk and took off, the fighters kept coming at you till you ran into the house. They never tried to eat each other like the layers, either. I always wondered if it wasn’t a sort of mongrel vigor.
As always, the wisdom of Seinfeld is instructive here: