I just had a bad experience with guinea fowl a few weeks ago- they were attacking our hens. I haven't seen chicken mating before, so I'd like to know if the nastiness we were seeing might have been mating behavior rather than some other form of aggression.

We had a few that were raised from keets (the name for guinea chicks), and of course as is common with guineas (world's dumbest birds, I swear), a bunch immediately got eaten by dogs or something like that. We had two left and didn't do enough research to figure out that they were two lonely brothers - the voices of the males and females are different so we could have known this had we bothered to learn more about our pets.

People generally get these noisy little birds for insect control- they normally roam your property and have been documented to eat LOTS of bugs including ticks. Ours, however, didn't really didn't want to leave the comfy chicken enclosure (which is huge, more like a big barnyard than a coop), and were certainly eating lots of seed (it was winter when I moved here) rather than bugs. I'm sure in the warm weather they'd go after bugs but the roommates said that even in insect season they still mostly stayed inside the enclosure where their tick-eating wasn't of all that much use to the humans.

Well, these two boys started attacking the chickens this winter. I haven't seen ANY reference to that online - they're supposed to get along well with chickens and I've been around them+chickens in the past without seeing anything like that. Eventually they killed a hen (or she died of fright after hiding from them for a few days). At that point we started getting our chicken-butchering gear together, since the attacks were really brutal and they were apparently not useful insect control last summer. A few weeks later they started in on attacking the next lowest hen on the pecking order. We came home to find one of the guineas had the hen's comb in his beak and they were dragging her along the fence line, spattered in blood, etc. Lots of feather pulling had been done. We locked the guineas up for half a day in a stall, and the moment we let them out, they instantly rushed out past us and went after the same poor hen.

Well, pets-to-dinner-in-30-minutes it was, and we butchered the poor things (they're delicious by the way, they're a pheasant relative and a bit gamier than chicken, but for a dark meat person like me, that's heaven). As we were giving a chicken-butchering lesson to each other, someone said 'what are those organs in there up against their back?' of course, they turned out to be testicles, then I went back to read about what might have been causing the behavior and figured out that these guys were guys. I wonder if the attacks on the hen were related to sex- I've heard that chicken mating is brutal but haven't lived with any roosters before, so I haven't seen all of this. It is by the way possible for guineas and chickens to have sterile offspring, and it looks REALLY funny:
www.feathersite.com/Poultry/...brid.html

So, what do you think, folks- about the cause of the aggression?

I haven't written off having guineas in the future, but I'm also surprised that they were so un-prone to wandering outside the coop (at least by the roommates' reports, I didn't see them in insect season myself). In the past the guineas I lived with ran around the whole 3-acre property and didn't disturb the plants, so they were pretty good bug control just as advertised.