In our house some topics just happen in strange conversations....

Solar was telling me about his dream of a rooster standing peeing and falling over.  I commented that roosters do not have a penis.  Hence the discussion started.

Instead of an external organ resembling a penis, the rooster has a small bump, or papilla, located on the back wall of the cloaca under the tail feathers.

http://www.ehow.com/info_8664210_reproductive-system-rooster.html

Having been raised with chickens all I remember is the rooster always trying to jump on the back of the hens.  Toy 

Then why are they called Cocks?
Is this one of those things like calling your 6'8" 300 lb friend, Tiny?

Cock is short for cockerel, from the french coquelet.     Seven years of french finally came in handy. 

Cock is short for cockerel, from the french coquelet.     Seven years of french finally came in handy. 

Three and a 1/2 years of high school German and other that a few phrases the only thing I do remember is the first verse of Silent Night and the Dr Pepper commercial I translated and performed for the class....

Toy   

Well, I would have called an adult male chicken a rooster, not a cock, but apparently there is a difference.

From Wiki, please forgive me, but it was a good explanation:

Well, etymologically, the difference is in the USE of said bird. 'Rooster' is an adult male bird kept for EATING, or one who occupies the roost, as opposed to a bird kept for breeding purposes....
Hence I have a cage of roosters without any hens, that I will slaughter for the table, but I have only one cock with each group of hens. A bird over a year, but still edible is a rooster, a bird over 5 and not headed for the table, but kept for breeding is a cock.

So there you have it, they are called cock, because they are kept exclusively for breeding.

This used to bug the heck out of me when I first started learning anatomy.

Young me, wondering: "How do you tell a male bird from a female bird?"

And............   Toy

I was "gifted" by my sister a few years back with a couple of young chickens she said would be great laying hens. After I built them a spiffy henhouse with an array of nesting boxes and roosting perches, and spent a friggin' fortune on high-grade chicken feed, these two "laying hens" took to crowing on my front porch every morning around 4:30. The bigger one, with the dark feathers, could crow non-stop for two hours, a skill he promptly shared with his younger brother, the one with the white feathers, who extended the early A.M. crowing routine to THREE hours.

They sure sounded like roosters to me.

They sure tasted good too.

Is there a way to tell? How do you know if a young chicken is M or F?

Yep, roosters are tastier.

Correct: they are yummy!

But my question is: how do you tell? Do you spread their legs and poke around? Do you have them fill out a questionnaire? Do you resort to DNA testing?

From what I've read, you really can't tell, that's why as soon as they showed signs of becoming a cock, most people cooked them because they didn't want fertilized eggs.

I would have settled for ANY kind of eggs! LOL!!! Needless to say, I didn't get any.

I still would like to have some backyard chickens. I think I'll make 'em fill out questionnaires next time...