Pros: - Good for meat
- Decent eggs
- Can swim and protect each other
- Eat whatever you give them
Cons: - Too fat, so that they cannot escape predators easily
- Turn green grass into mud pits
We have (or maybe had) a group of nice Rouen ducks, 4 to be precise. We had more, but I'll explain why 10 dwindled down to 4.
Rouens are excellent meat ducks, and we sold two males to an old friend who liked duck meat. They gave a 5 out of 5 on the spot! Wham! The eggs they produced, around one a day for one female, sold for $10 a dozen! And, Rouens look like fat mallards, so they are disguised as flyers when they can barely jump!
This is where things turn drastically. These duckies CANNOT run!!! Do I need to specify? Our smartest female Rouen became lunch after a coyote spotted it. Two black labs almost killed all of our ducks! So, keep Rouens in a safe place protected on all sides. A LGD (Livestock guardian dog) would also work.
Anyways, Rouens are mainly gentle except when mating... keep in mind that you want a very balanced number of male and females when inside the same coop.
And last of all, when confining Rouens in a small space for even a week, they can turn bright green grass into a mud pit of all sorts of yucky stuff. It'll be a ninja warrior course to you, but duck's webbed feet help them glide over all sorts of terrain. This is also the reason why this is a 4/5 start review.
