Killer Chickens - The Movie.

Be afraid....be very afraid!!



Keeping chickens at home

KFC - The price you pay for cheap meat!

Keeping chickens at home

Two Chickens Break Up Rabbit Fight!!!

Keeping chickens at home

Is It Safe To Eat If It Is Cooked Properly?

'Is it safe to eat if cooked properly'

Keith Parkins

What confidence can we have in a diseased food product, when we are assured not to worry, as it is safe to eat if cooked properly? Not eat it, maybe?

'Look, if you are going to process poultry at that price, there's not much that you can do. The important thing is that they are killed humanely. The factories are designed to get them through fast. People want cheap food.' -- Janet Corry, research fellow in food microbiology, University of Bristol

'Half of the chicken on sale in UK in supermarkets is contaminated with campylobacter. Campylobacter causes a nasty kind of food poisoning with severe, often bloody diarrhoea.' -- Felicity Lawrence

'When I wear a pair of Armani trousers they do not become a part of me. But when I eat a slice of ham it does. That's why I spend money on food.' -- Carlo Petrini, founder and Italian president of the Slow Food Movement

'The eating of properly cooked poultry meat and eggs presents no risk to humans – these products are 110 per cent safe.' -- Nigel Horrox, president of British Veterinary Poultry Association

The message being put out by the poultry industry, is that our wholesome product is perfectly safe to eat if cooked well. Quite ok then to handle a contaminated product in its raw state?

Is this meant to engender in me a sense of confidence, that their corrupted product is safe to eat so long as I cook it properly? Would it not be better not to have a diseased product in the first place, not the onus placed on me to be to ensure I cook it properly to ensure I do not fall ill with food poisoning?

If nothing else, this must rule out eating at KFC, where the food is often undercooked.

Over half the chickens on sale in UK supermarkets are contaminated with either campylobacter or salmonella. The problem used to be salmonella, but following the problems of salmonella in eggs, the incidents of salmonella has gone down but that of campylobacter has risen. Although having said that, there is now a worrying rise of antibiotic resistant strains of salmonella.

You are more likely these days to be infected with salmonella from buying packets of fresh-washed, that is washed in a mild chlorine solution, salad leaves.

Campylobacter is a very unpleasant form of food poisoning, causing a severe, often bloody diarrhoea.

Having been carted off to a private clinic in an ambulance, with a bad case of gastroenteritis, and placed on a drip for several days, I know how bad a severe case of food poisoning can be.

Conventional wisdom is to wash all food first. With contaminated poultry, this can make the situation worse, as you are splashing infection all around your sink, on your hands, unless you then scrupulously clean up afterwards.

Poultry live out their short miserable lives in darkened sheds. Their feet have ammonia burns from standing in their own shit. They can barely stand on their weakened legs.

From their darkened existence, chickens are suddenly carted off to be killed, packed into crates, the crates piled one on top the other, packed into a lorry. The chickens panic and shit themselves, those in the top crates emptying their bowels over the chickens in the lower crates.

The chickens then arrive at the slaughter house to be killed humanely, maybe. Hygiene is a secondary consideration, profit and the production of cut-price food the major consideration.

The birds, hanging by their feet, are electrocuted, then have their necks sliced, not too much blood. Then into the scald bath to loosen feathers, ready for removal later down the production line.

The water in the scald bath is only changed once a day. 180 birds a minute pass through. Soon it is the colour of mud with faeces, blood and feathers. It only takes one bird contaminated with salmonella or campylobacter, and all the birds for the remainder of that day become contaminated. Factory-reared, organic, free range, it doesn't matter, they all pass through the same scald bath, then on for 'processing'.

The rich brown soup that the scald bath has become, is maintained at 52 degrees centigrade, ideal conditions for campylobacter, salmonella and other pathogens to thrive.

The plucking machines pummel the dead carcasses to remove the feathers, squeezing out more faecal matter in the process, more contamination. The bacterial count rises ten fold.

And on to be cut, sliced, packaged and onwards to the supermarket shelves.

Fancy a takeaway from KFC anyone?

Like some shit with your French fries sir?

Or maybe a Turkey Twizzler?

Waste not want not is the motto of industrial food processing, adulterate whenever possible, or when you think you can get away with it.

High pressure hoses, wash off the bones, what can only be described as supermarket slurry. Mix with ground up skins, add some fat, bulk out with water, hold together with modified starch and gums, add some flavouring, then coat with bread crumbs. Yuk!

Feeding our children chicken nuggets is tantamount to child abuse, which is why Jamie Oliver kicked up such a stink that such 'food' is standard fare on the menu of school dinners, and why local people in Aldershot and further afield, questioned what was their Member of Parliament doing pictured on the front page of the local paper promoting McDonald's and bragging that he took his kids there when they were young.

'British poultry' is sourced from Holland, which in turn is sourced from Thailand and Brazil. In Holland, it is pumped full of water and various additives to enable it to hold up to 30% water. One of these additives is hydrolyzed beef proteins from waste beef, often from blood and bone, high BSE-risk material. Pushed to its limit, it is possible to inject 50% water. The technology for turning water into gold, has been heavily promoted in Eastern Europe.

Is this what was meant by 'partly-processed poultry' that Bernard Mathews imported into Suffolk from their factories in Hungary? A possible route for avian flu into the UK.

The DNA profile of the H5N1 strain of avian flu found at the Bernard Mathews factory in Suffolk was found to be the same as that found in Hungary, ie the two strains of the H5N1 avian flu viruses were identical.

The government should have blocked all poultry imports from Hungary, once there was an outbreak of avian flu, but they did not. They did not because they were more concerned with maintaining confidence in the poultry industry, than the risks posed to human health. They also cited EU rules. Yet another reason for the UK to withdraw from the EU.

The Times has reported that Bernard Mathews may have exported turkey to Hungary. If true, spreading H5N1 strain of avian flu yet further afield.

The drip, drip feed of antibiotics to animals, is causing antibiotic resistance and rendering many antibiotics useless.

Production of cheap poultry for the supermarket shelves is a multi-billion pound industry. Hence the worry the recent major outbreak of avian flu may have on sales.

Poultry production has become an industrialised, globalised business. The more food is shipped around and across borders, the easier it is to hide fraud and that the food has been adulterated.

How fresh is that 'fresh chicken', shipped as it may have been, halfway around the world?

A 'fresh chicken' on a supermarket shelve, can be at least eight days old before it reaches the supermarket distribution depot.

When Felicity Lawrence went undercover for The Guardian at a chicken factory in Devon that supplies 'fresh British chickens' to Sainsbury's, she found chicken breasts being shipped in from Holland, repackaged with a red tractor label (to show authentic British farm produce), and a new sell-by date

Bernard Mathews poultry we were told came from Norfolk, but now we learn he has factories in Hungary that were shipping lorry-loads of partly-processed turkeys to his Suffolk factories. We cannot call these industrial units farms. 32 tonnes of partly-processed turkeys have been arriving in Britain from Bernard Matthews Hungarian plants every week.

Poultry unfit for human consumption is cleaned up and recycled back into the human food chain.
Denby Poultry, until they were caught, were taking condemned poultry unfit for human consumption, cleaning it up, cutting off the mouldy bits, and recycling it back into the human food chain. Denby Poultry were recycling low and high-risk waste contaminated with hepatitis, Staphylococci and E.coli-septicaemia. The owner of Denby Poultry, Peter Roberts, was known in the trade as 'Maggot Pete'.

Recycling waste back into the food chain saves the cost of having to pay for its disposal.

As Felicity Lawrence writes, at the root of all our farming and food problems, is industrialised food production:

'It is not a coincidence that European farmers have lurched from crisis to crisis like this. Our methods of farming livestock intensively and of moving animals vast distances make them particularly vulnerable to epidemics of disease.

For centuries traditional farms were mixed, partly to take advantage of the virtuous circle of plants feeding animals whose manure feeds the plants, but also as an insurance against the risk of disease. Farm diseases are usually quite specific, and attacked one type of livestock or crop.

The best way to prevent them is to avoid keeping too many of the same animals together in one place, and to rotate them so the cycle of diseases and parasites is broken. Organic farmers know this. Once a disease does strike, just as isolation works with human illness, so keeping animals away from contact with other animals of their type is the best way of controlling it. Modern systems of monoculture do the opposite.

Meat and livestock are not only regularly transported around the world but also kept together in great crowds in the same place year after year. By the time a disease has been noticed, it has often taken devastating grip.'

Until the advent of modern, industrialised farming, this was how Man farmed from when he learnt how to walk upright. Contrast this with the Bernard Mathews where 2,000 birds died of avian flu in one turkey-rearing shed and 159,000 birds at the site had to be destroyed, where turkey meat is being shipped around the country and across Europe.

Proponents of the poultry industry would say they provide us with cheap food. They don't, all they do is externalise their costs. Society picks up the bill.

If we want decent food, then we have to be prepared to pay for it.

Do we really expect to pay the same price for a chicken as a cup of crap coffee at Starbucks and there not be a hidden cost somewhere?

A major outbreak of bird flu in the UK has woken up the population to how bad is the poultry industry.

Bird flu passes from infected birds to humans. The W.H.O has warned that if avian flu mutated and attached itself to human flu, the consequences would be devastating. The medical journal The Lancet has warned that if it became contagious among the human population, the prospect of a worldwide pandemic was 'massively frightening'.

The outbreak of avian flu at the Bernard Mathews turkey-rearing sheds in Suffolk, has exposed the tip of the iceberg of a vile industry.

Woman prepares to fight for her chickens

Woman prepares to fight for her chickens: Kent resident will speak to City Council about ban on poultry in small yards



By Bruce Rommel
Journal Reporter


KENT — If people can have a kennel in the backyard and one or two big barking dogs, what's wrong with having a chicken coop and keeping a few hens?

That's one of the questions Tami Jayne Jackson has for the Kent City Council.

Jackson plans to be at Tuesday night's meeting, asking council members to consider changing the ordinance that bans livestock, poultry or fowl unless you have an extra-large home lot.

"Chickens don't take up that much space," said Jackson, whose six hens scratch around an enclosed pen in the backyard of her East Hill home.

So far, she's won support from City Council President Deborah Ranniger, who notes that even in urban Seattle, people may legally keep chickens or rabbits in small backyards.

"If Seattle can do that, I don't know why Kent can't," Ranniger said.

The councilwoman said she wants to ask the city's planning staff to review the ordinance and come up with some options for review.

"I think there's a lot of interest in keeping chickens or rabbits," said Ranniger, who had a pet rabbit in the yard when her children were little.

Council members are scheduled to vote Tuesday on a list of land-use issues to be considered next year. Jackson wants codes involving animals added to the list.

She and her husband, Doug Grimes, have been notified by city code enforcement officers that the hens at their home at Southeast 283rd Street and 144th Avenue Southeast are in violation of codes.

They could be fined up to $500 per day by a hearing examiner as long as the chickens remain. But a code enforcement officer said the city isn't taking any action until the City Council decides whether to review the issue.

Some cities allow poultry in smaller yards, while Kent requires a yard of 20,000 square feet or larger to keep poultry or livestock.

Jackson's yard is about 12,000 square feet.

Seattle allows up to three chickens in any backyard. Angelina Shell of Seattle Tilth, an organization that promotes organic gardening, said "hundreds of people" in Seattle have urban chickens.

"A lot of yards in Seattle are about 3,000 square feet," Shell said.

Jackson keeps hens for the fresh eggs and composts straw and manure from their pen for the garden.

"I don't want roosters because they can crow all day and annoy the neighbors," she said.


Keeping chickens at home.

Not All Sausages Are Born Equal It Seems!

Sausage factory

What's the difference between top-of-the range and economy? Is it just
ingredients or are the animals treated differently, too? Felicity Lawrence
investigates

Saturday May 10, 2003

All pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than others, especially by
the time they have been turned into sausages. In fact the gulf between the
toothpaste tubes of flavoured pink fat that pass for economy sausages and
the best made bangers could not be wider. Yet in the Orwellian world of food
regulation and labelling it can be hard to tell them apart. Mass produced,
dependent on the industrialisation of livestock, the origin of its
ingredients frequently unidentifiable and debased, the cheap sausage is a
classic product of our system of 21st century food production.
Last year we consumed 1.7bn meals of sausages at home, according to market
analyst Taylor Nelson Sofres, and our appetite for them is expanding. Many
more were sold by caterers.

Until a few years ago manufacturers put all sorts of unmentionables into
their sausages. Diaphragms and spleens, tails and lips all counted as meat.
But since the trauma of BSE there have been much tighter restrictions on
which parts can be used for human consumption and processors have moved on.
The industry is now polarised between those leading a revival in top-of-the
range sausages (made with what most people would recognise as meat for those
who can afford around £3 a pound) and those operating at what producers
refer to as "the arse end" of the sector where sausages sell for 50-55p a
pound or for even less to caterers. Those who most need the best - growing
children, the elderly, those in hospital - nearly always eat the worst.

The secret of the successful "economy" sausage these days lies not so much
in strange offals but in fat and protein engineering. Pig rind is an
essential ingredient in the protein engineer's toolbox. Frozen, imported,
chopped to a slurry and soaked with hot water, it produces a bargain
blancmange which can make up 30-35% of the sausage and still be called meat.
Manufacturers' handbooks recommend rind emulsion because its high protein
content boosts the nitrogen counts which are the basis for tests to
determine the meat content of products.

The cutting edge now, however, is in fat technology. Fat is seriously cheap
and with the help of additives you can make it eat with a bit of chew, just
like meat. You can buy thick rectangular slabs of pork back fat for about
50p a kilo to make your economy sausage. But if you want to cut costs even
further, the cheapest stuff on the market is something called flare fat.
This is the highly saturated fat that collects around the vital organs of
the pig such as the kidneys. It was traditionally rendered into lard because
you couldn't put it into sausages without it running straight back out again
when they were cooked. It also clogs up your arteries. But now food
scientisits are developing ways to make it hard so it doesn't ooze out.

You might mix your fat with what people in the trade call the posh man's
MRM. Mechanically recovered meat has to be declared on the label and
shoppers have become increasingly suspicious of it. So, instead,
manufacturers have developed the LIMA machine. Unlike an MRM processor,
which crushes the carcass after the main muscle meat has been removed, a
LIMA machine can debone the last scraps of meat from a carcass by pushing it
through a stainless steel sieve at a lower pressure. Splinters of bone will
give it a higher calcium content than muscle meat in tests but the hard
bones are left behind and it doesn't have to be declared on the label.

For a bit of economy texture you would probably also add pork cheek or jowl.
Sausages were, after all, invented to use the offcuts of animals. The jowl
is the bit of the pig from the earhole to the end of the snout, which is cut
off, deboned, skinned and block frozen. But while many manufacturers use
jowls, some worry about including them. They contain the pituitary glands
and therefore tend to be where drug residues or disease are concentrated.
"Put it this way, you wouldn't knowingly fry them for breakfast," one
explained. Because it has been in direct contact with the animal's food, the
butchered jowl tends to have high microbiological counts and degenerates at
twice the speed of the rest of the carcass.

Add plenty of water, rusk (sometimes up to 30%), sugar in the form of
dextrose to make them go brown when cooked, flavourings and colourings to
mask the absence of anything we would recognise as meat, phosphates and soya
to bind the water and fat in, and you have the perfect recipe for big
profits.

Here is a recipe for a school sausage, given to us by a manufacturer who
prefers to remain anonymous. It is for what he described as a "pork product"
made "down to a price" to win a local authority contract. The sausage
contents: 50% "meat", of which 30% is pork fat with a bit of jowl, and 20%
mechanically recovered chicken meat, 17% water, 30% rusk and soya, soya
concentrate, hyrolysed protein, modified flour, dried onion, sugar,
dextrose, phosphates, preservative E221 sodium sulphite, flavour enhancer,
spices, garlic flavouring, antioxidant E300 (ascorbic acid), colouring E128
(red 2G). Casings: made from collagen from cow hide.

Bernard Hoggarth is a sausage manufacturer at the top end of the market and
he can't quite make sense of it. "We feed our pigs the best possible
wheatgerm, the best milk, the best soya. Yet people feed their children
rubbish. Funny, isn't it?" Hoggarth's business, Cranswick gourmet sausage
company, supplies Sainsbury's with its Taste the Difference range of
sausages, Prince Charles with his Duchy Originals, and Waitrose, Safeway and
Morrison's through a sister company, Lazenby. The wheatgerm for fattening
his pigs is the vitamin-rich, highly nutritious casing of the wheat which is
stripped out and discarded when wheat is milled to white flour - to make
white sliced bread, say. Cranswick sausages cost just under £3 a pound
because they use real ingredients. Prime shoulder and belly pork are mixed
with fresh herbs, delivered daily, or real wine, garlic and olive oil. The
store room in Hoggarth's Hull-based factory is packed with the sort of slabs
of meat, oils and green leaves most cooks would be happy to have in their
larders.

The food standards agency has proposed new rules to require clearer
labelling of meat content, so that added fat, offal, gristle and rind would
have to be separately identified and shoppers could tell more easily what
they are getting. The move has been welcomed by consumer groups but they are
also worried. The proposals will lower the legal minimum meat content, so
that pork sausages would only have to contain 42% meat as newly defined.
Manufacturers will no longer have to declare the amount of water they have
added either, which "gives them an opportunity for fraud and debasement,"
according to Shropshire trading standards expert, David Walker.

But it is not just in the quality of the ingredients that the difference
between the Cranswick sausages and the economy version is evident. Their
provenance encapsulates the gap between food that is produced with concern
for animal welfare and environmental impact and that which is not. All the
meat Cranswick uses comes from British outdoor reared pigs which have mostly
been fed by its own feedmills and have been slaughtered in its own abattoirs
so that quality can be controlled right down the line.

Not all swine do so well. Some are indeed more equal than others. Last
summer Dutch and Belgian pigs, many of which would have ended up being
imported in to the UK for manufacturing in to products such as sausages, had
particular cause for complaint.

They were found to have been illegally fed waste from the production of
hormone replacement therapy pills for postmenopausal women.

Residues of medroxy progesterone acetate (MPA), a synthetic hormone, found
in the pigs were traced back to Wyeth, an American owned pharmaceutical
factory in Ireland. MPA is banned from vetinerary use in Europe but is used
in the USA and Australia as a growth-promoting hormone to make livestock put
on weight faster.

A Dublin-based waste management company Cara had been collecting the water
used in the production of sugar-coated HRT pills from the Wyeth factory and
shipping it to a company called Bioland on the Dutch /Belgian border. There
it was converted into glucose syrup to be mixed into pig feed. Nearly 100
Dutch feed manufacturers used the syrup and exported it throughout Europe.
Dutch pig farms were closed down while their animals were tested and
thousands of pigs were slaughtered. Wyeth and Cara both deny responsibility.
Bioland is now bankrupt and its owners have been charged with breaches of
food safety legislation. Belgian authorities are still investigating how
widespread the use of illegal hormones in pig production is. Although the
effects on humans of eating pork contaminated with MPA are thought to be
short-lived, the scandal followed hot on the heels of others about animal
feed contaminated with cancer-causing dioxins, and did nothing, post-BSE, to
dispel the impression that Europe's meat industry is the dustbin of its food
sector.

A short and fully traceable supply chain is one of the reasons British
consumers, when asked, say they prefer British meat, and supermarkets say
they support British farmers. Yet the UK pig industry is dying on its feet.
Four years ago the British herd numbered 800,000 breeding sows. Now there
are barely 500,000. About 2,000 pig farmers have gone out of business in
that period and many predict the end of pork production in this country.

Although there were government subsidies in the 1960s to encourage
intensification and greater productivity, pig farmers have received almost
no subsidies from the EU. The trend in the UK in the last decade has instead
been to improve welfare, in response to apparent public demand. British
farmers, and legislation, are currently ahead of European competitors on
standards. But the strength of the pound against the euro has meant that
they have been heavily squeezed, and although many people, including
retailers, say they want happy pigs they don't put their money where their
mouths are. "All supermarkets take it as accepted that they will pay the
lowest price on the day. There is no other mechanism for them. Buyers cannot
buck the trend," Digby Scott, editor of Pig World, says.

The beginning of the decline can be traced back to BSE. The UK banned meat
and bonemeal in animal feed in 1996, so instead of making a bit of money
from selling the parts of the pig not suitable for human consumption,
farmers had to pay to dispose of them. This so called BSE tax was calculated
by the meat and livestock commission to be costing British pig farmers £5.26
per pig. In the rest of Europe they continued to use meat and bonemeal from
animals until 2000, when a ban was introduced. EU farmers have until 2005 to
implement it however. Outside the EU it is still legal, despite evidence of
BSE in Continental herds.

Mark Hayward is a pig farmer in Wickham Market in Suffolk. Like most British
farmers these days he is very angry. He is not above joining a convoy of
other farmers to blockade supermarket distribution centres when he hears
that they are importing Dutch pork while claiming to buy to British
standards.

He invested heavily in converting his pig farm from intensive production to
Freedom Foods standards a couple of years ago. His sows now farrow outdoors
and his piglets are fattened in outdoor straw pens. Out in the fresh air
rather than crowded 2,000 to a shed, they are less susceptible to the
respiratory diseases which plague intensive units and so he doesn't have to
use the routine antibiotics others do. Nor does he need to practise tail
docking, a routine mutilation made necessary when pigs kept in barren and
overcrowded conditions bite each other.

But responding to animal welfare campaigners' pressure has cost British
farmers their competitive edge, according to Hayward. Times are hard and he
is now getting rid of a large part of his herd of pigs in the hope of
surviving.

To take an example, the sow stall was banned in the UK in 1990 and had to be
phased out by 1999, yet it will still be allowed in the rest of the EU until
2013. A sow stall is a crate with bars into which a pregnant sow weighing
300kg is pushed to remain for its breeding life. She can stand up and lie
down but otherwise not move, having only six inches in front of her and six
inches behind. Stalls are very efficient - a farmer can squeeze 50 sows into
the space he or she now needs for 10 animals, and feed and water them
easily, but they are immensely distressing to the pigs, according to Peter
Stevenson of Compassion in World Farming. Not only are intensive systems
cruel, but they make herds vulnerable to the rapid spread of devastating
diseases such as foot and mouth and swine fever. But abolishing them costs
money, which is one of the reasons British farmers' pork is more expensive.

Elsewhere in East Anglia, a pig farmer agreed to take us into one of his
intensive pig units, on the condition of anonymity. Walking down the
corridor of Stalag 13, as he cheerfully called it, brushing under the filth
hanging from the low ceilings and holding our noses against the stench of
ammonia, we peered through inspection hatches into darkened pens where pigs
were crowded on to slatted floors. The slats cause bruising and foot
injuries, the pigs are bred to grow so fast and large they frequently suffer
from joint and leg problems, and one in 10 births has to be assisted because
confined sows cannot exercise their uterine muscles.

The smell is a reminder of the environmental problems caused by this sort of
farming. Pigs which are intensively fed grain produce shit high in nitrates
and phosphates. In small quantities and spread over an adequate area of land
it is fertilising. But in the large quantities excreted by intensive pig
farms, it is highly polluting.

But as Bernard Hoggarth says, "you gets what you pays for"

Keeping Chickens At Home

Council OK with chickens in city

Associated Press

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A city councilman drew guffaws and cackles by striding into the council chambers in a yellow chicken costume moments before the council discussed an ordinance that would allow residents to keep chickens within city limits.

Councilman Steve Volan's chicken suit led to a string of jokes before the serious business of chicken-keeping got under way Wednesday evening.

During the discussion, 21 audience members spoke in favor of allowing city residents to raise egg-laying chickens, and four spoke against it.

Volan joined the 5-1 council majority in voting to recommend the ordinance for final approval Wednesday. Three council members abstained from voting.

Lucille Bertuccio, president of the Center for Sustainable Living, said that when people grow their own food and raise their own chickens, they actually contribute to public health.

"When you buy eggs from factory farms, they contain antibiotics, pesticides, hormones. You should not be eating those eggs," Bertuccio said.

Opponents of chicken-keeping said they fear that neighbors with chickens would affect property values and threaten the public health.

"Poultry in city limits is not a good idea," said Bob Schmidt of the Monroe County Health Department, citing risks of salmonella contamination and illnesses.

The provision would charge residents a $25 fee for a chicken-keeping permit and restrict the number of chickens per coop to five, with one coop per property owner.

**VIDEO** Chicks Hatching In Incubator

Here's a cool video of a chick actually hatching out from his shell in an incubator. You cannot believe how hard it is to resist helping them get out.

Pete

Chicken Rearing 101 - How Not to Raise Chickens

Chick: A hatchling
Capon: A castrated male used for meat. (How much could that yield?)
Pullet: A female chicken under one year old.
Hen: A female chicken over one year of age
Rooster: A male chicken over one year of age.

Raising Chickens for the first time can be intimidating. When I first called the Feed Shop, I was trying to sound like a pro. I asked, “Do you sell pullets?” “Yes”, the man replied. “Are they all females?” It’s been an uphill battle ever since.

Pullet parenthood is an much of an adventure as child rearing, only with more feces per pound of body weight. However, I’ve been reading quite a bit on poultry matters. (Yes, my coolness just turned over in its grave.) So if I am correct and I am quite certain I am not, here is how chicken rearin’ goes.

Go to your local feed store and purchase $10.00 worth of chicks and $50 worth of food and supplies. Don’t forget the water dispensers. Buying the metal ones, never plastic is always advised. I have yet to see a metal one.

Next, place the chicks somewhere sheltered, like a bedroom closet. Toss in some highly flammable straw or wood shavings and promptly dangle a glowing heat lamp just above them. Note to self: Update homeowner’s policy.

For the next several weeks feed them 3 lbs of food per day and remove 4 lbs of sh*t per day from the closet. Despite all logic the birds get bigger. As the adult feathers grow in be sure to clip one of their wings. That is one per bird, not just one wing total. If clipping is done late chicks will nest in your toilet. This is a bad thing.

Clipping can be accomplished by tossing your scissors and your body into the heaping mound of chicks, poop and straw. Grab a wiggling screeching bird from the bile pile. Restrain it with one hand. Stretch the wing out with your second hand. Clip off 50% of the wings outer ten feathers with your third hand.

As the birds grow adjust the heat light temperature down by one degree per day. No, this is not actually possible. That’s not my point. You start at 100 degrees for hatchlings then continue down by one degree per day until your bedroom is a minimum of 3 degrees cooler than the spring blizzard outside your window.

Once you have frozen your ear to your semi-cannibalistic down pillow and the chicks have grown their adult feathers, they can be moved outside to the coop. I estimate the initial closet rearing stage to have taken five years.

Before the move, experience the Joy of Wing Clipping one more time. Feather clipping never works the first time. No one knows why. Still, after all the hassle you probably don’t want them to fly the coop in under sixty seconds. Of course, if you’re like me, by this time you may be inclined to pack them each a lunch and leave a stack of Greyhound tickets by the open coop gate.

Regarding habitat construction: Hen houses and chicken coops are a competitive art form. There are a myriad of web sites showing off architectural designs from Chicken Chateaus to Bird Bordellos. The meticulous craftsmanship makes my own home look like – well – like a chicken coop.

Always fashionable, I went with a shabby chic motif for my coop. The nesting boxes are an eclectic mix of stolen milk crates affixed to the wall by anything in arms reach. As for the coop itself, there is a gift for tight chicken wire, which eludes me. Quite frankly, my first attempt at a coop looks like Dr. Seuss dropped a hit of acid, blasted some Jefferson Starship and rolled around on the wire with every Who in Whoville. I think I’ll keep it.

Inferior design aside, I ultimately learned a thing or two. The nesting boxes are supposed to be up off the ground. That is correct. For those of you keeping score you just spent two weeks cutting back the birds flight feathers only to hang their houses in the sky. It’s just sick.

Higher than the nest boxes, you are to build a roost. This is where the birds crap at night so they do not crap on your breakfast eggs. Of course the roost is usually OVER the nesting boxes, so whatever you do, don’t use those perforated plastic milk crates.

For young birds maintain a heat light in the hen house. Then on cooler nights an animal with a brain the size of an bulimic toe nail clipping will make the conscious decision to forgo your nest boxes, bypass the instinctual roost and leap into a tanning bed.

And finally there is the feed regime. I asked several experts and read up on feeding as well. Make sure to give your chickens, starter formula, mash, growth formula, start & grow, brood formula, grit, no grit, scraps, no scraps, goat placenta, nothing suggested on the internet, tetramyaicn, no antibiotics, medicated starter, non-medicated starter and never ever switch in-between.

I may not be Queen of the Coop yet, but I’m working on it. Though I am still a zoologist and I still know Birds 101. Here are two myths I can help with. First, you do not need a rooster to get eggs. Most folk, especially those who have never owned chickens, will advise you on chickens. Each will insist you need a rooster for a while to do his manly duties, then you can slip him in the pot. As appealing as this concept is, your pot is a separate issue.

Roosters are only needed to make fertile eggs. Hens are all that is needed to make breakfast eggs. Fertile eggs are just peachy if raising chicks was such a joy the first time you want to repeat the whole freakin’ process. In addition there is always the risk of breaking a fertilized egg open and finding a 50% formed chick fetus hitting your hot skillet. Yum! Years of therapy will follow.

To keep it straight in your mind consider this: You are going about your life. Suddenly massive balls of calcium start stacking up inside your abdomen. Are you going to hold on to them just because you have not had sex lately?

The second bird myth is totally unrelated so I thought I would mention it. Penguins occur in nature from the Equator on Southward. That is down to the Antarctica, not the Arctic! No, they do not hang out with Polar Bears who live in the Arctic. No, you did not see them when you worked in Alaska, in the Arctic. Those were puffins.

No, I am not sorry you look stupid to all those folks you told penguin tales to.
Yes, some penguin species even reside on the Galapagos Islands at the equator (Cold weather would kill them), not floating around on icebergs - and not in the Arctic! Yes, I realize my eggs are not all in one basket. Delusional, close-minded people who insist you need a rooster to fertilize your penguin eggs so polar bears won’t loose their food supply drove me crazy!

by: Nola L. Kelsey

Wild in the city?

Think you need land to live like a farmer? Think again.

By Joe Eaton

It's a fantasy for some city dwellers -- to someday move to a piece of land in the country, maybe buy a tractor, grow corn or raise animals. But as some Roanokers are proving, you don't need a large space to find your inner farmer.

David Dodson never meant to be a beekeeper. Thirteen years ago, the retired 78-year-old tractor-trailer driver took a few hives to deliver to a friend. The friend got sick, and the bees wound up in the back yard of Dodson's 11,000-square-foot lot in Northwest Roanoke. "I've been foolin' with bees since then," Dodson said on a recent morning as he searched through a hive for an underperforming queen bee.

Dodson has four hives in his back yard this year. Usually he has five, the maximum he can keep by law. There are benefits to keeping bees in the city over rural areas, Dodson said. There are more flowering plants and shrubs in the city for the bees to collect nectar from. Dodson sells honey from his home. This year, he expects he'll have 240 pounds from his backyard hives for sale. He sells for $4 a pint and $8 a quart.

Keeping bees isn't as much work as people think, Dodson said. He spends an hour a week inspecting the hives and then a few days in the fall extracting and bottling the honey.In the past, neighbors complained to the city when Dodson's bees swarmed their humming bird feeders. But an inspector found he was not breaking the law. Dodson said most of his neighbors don't mind the bees. They help pollinate their gardens.

The hardest thing about raising bees is getting stung, and Dodson doesn't mind that much. "It helps my arthritis," he said. "There are a lot of medicinal purposes around bees. A lot of it is folklore. A lot of it works."

Just eggs, for now. Joe and Jennifer Carnes own just over an acre in Northwest Roanoke. It's not huge, but for the Carneses who grew up in tight neighborhoods, it's a farm.

Soon after they moved to the house in 2005, they began filling it up. First came a garden, with tomatoes and cucumbers. Then, in April, Joe Carnes bought two hives of bees. Later that month the 27-year-old bought six Rhode Island Red chicks."This is just a wild feather that caught me," Joe Carnes said, adding that friends at the architectural firm where he works have been giving him a hard time about his farming.

They live in a coop he built from scrap wood and eat from an automatic feeder. He spends three hours, usually on the weekends, cleaning the coop and changing the straw. Next year, the Carneses plan to add at least one rooster and maybe a few ducks. They are nervous about what the neighbors will think of the rooster's morning crow. "I don't want to be a nuisance or anything, but it would be nice to repopulate," said Joe Carnes.

The Carneses will soon have fresh eggs and honey. They plan to give much of it away to friends and family. But they won't be eating fried chicken anytime soon. "We waited too long. My wife named each of them, which knocks the current six candidates out of the running," Joe Carnes said.

The yard farmer. At first glance, Rick Williams' back yard in the Williamson Road neighborhood looks like a suburban fantasy, complete with a swing set and an in-ground pool.But the pool no longer holds chlorinated water. In 2004, Williams turned it into a cistern to collect rain water for the yard he is turning into an urban farm. For Williams, a 51-year-old who serves on the city planning commission, grass is the enemy. His yard is now a jungle of vegetables, berry bushes and fruit trees. It is more than a common garden. Williams practices permaculture, a design-based philosophy of growing food naturally.

Williams uses no chemicals on his crops and is obsessed about promoting rich soil. His crops are not planted in neat rows. Butternut squash peek out from below blueberry bushes. Eight-foot tomato plants climb bamboo poles. For Williams, yard farming is an experiment in community building. He eats most of his produce, but he also sells some to neighbors. He hopes to start a system in which neighbors will buy into the garden each year and get fruits and vegetables in return.

He thinks his backyard farm can someday feed up to six families and make the neighborhood more of a community. His advice for those dreaming of moving to the country to farm is to look at their own yards. "Everyone in this city has land that is being used for nothing right now except to grow grass," he said.

Keeping chickens at home

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Keeping Chickens at Home - Latest UK Avian Flu News

UK sees no need to confine chickens over bird flu

7th March 2006
Reuters


By Nigel Hunt

LONDON, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Britain sees no need yet to lock up chickens despite news that deadly bird flu has moved closer to its shores while the vaccination of poultry was "under review" on Monday.

British consumers also reacted calmly to the latest scare with sales of chicken remaining strong, retailers said.

France and Germany have imposed bans on farmers keeping poultry outdoors as an H5N1 strain of bird flu spreads across Europe. Last week the virus reached France, with an infected duck found dead near Lyon.

"If there is another case in France on a migratory route then we would have another look (at keeping chickens indoors)," a spokesman for Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said on Monday.

He added that the case in eastern France was not on a migratory route to Britain.

The spokesman said nine swans found dead in Britain had been tested for the deadly strain but results had been negative.

The H5N1 strain has spread from Asia to Europe and Africa and killed 93 people as well as millions of birds.

Freda Scott-Park, president of the British Veterinary Association, said the decision to continue to allow chickens to be kept outdoors had been taken after a long debate involving industry experts.

"We have to keep our reaction proportionate (to the threat). The trigger point (for imposing a ban) may well be if bird flu moves further west in France or if it arrives in this country," she said.

PRACTICAL PROBLEMS

Virologist Nigel Dimmock of Warwick University saw practical problems in keeping the flock indoors, which meant the government needed to ensure it was absolutely necessary.

"It certainly would help against poultry picking up the virus from wild birds. The question is judging when it is necessary," he said.

Dimmock, who chaired an investigation into Britain's bird flu quarantine arrangements, backed the government strategy in tackling the threat.

"It is not possible to control the forces of nature entirely but I think everybody is on the ball," he said.

France and the Netherlands have been seeking permission from the European Union to vaccinate poultry against the virus and a spokesman for DEFRA said Britain's policy was "under review".

BVA president Scott-Park said there were benefits but the logistical challenges would be "enormous".

She said the British government was, however, seriously considering vaccinating zoo birds, a step that had been taken in other countries.

Dimmock said some vaccines might protect chickens but not necessarily end an infection.

"It is a kind of halfway house which could be the worst of all worlds," he said, adding the virus could then become endemic in British poultry and re-emerge among birds that had not been vaccinated.

The latest bird flu scare had no impact on sales of poultry in Britain, according to leading retailers Tesco and Sainsbury .

"Sales remain strong," a spokeswoman for Tesco said.


Keeping Chickens at Home

Keeping Chickens at Home - Spring in the air?

Keeping Chickens at Home - Spring in the air?

The Cock and the Drake are all "at it" with the ladies and with lighter mornings and evenings, it can only mean one thing - Spring is just starting to show it's face.

The hens are really laying again after a very quiet winter. In fact, they started about a month ago, but they are really popping them out now.

There are four things that I really love about keeping chickens;

[1] Putting your hand into the clean straw of a nesting box and taking hold of the smooth, warm, eggy pebble is best of all.

[2] That they taste - really properly taste of egg (It is amazing how shockingly little bought eggs seem to taste of anything ).

[3] Their quirky manner and prettiness against the grass of the orchard, which adds more colour at this time of year than any plant I can think off.

The manure is a useful addition to the compost heap, too. In short, they span the garden and kitchen as easily as carrots or the hazel trees (whose catkins are exceptionally vivid, and early this year, by the way).

The hens are not alone. All the birds are at it. The dawn chorus in February is not as loud or as air-fillingly broad as it is in April, but it is almost unbearably thrilling, starting as a thin reed of sound in the dark, which is gradually picked up by individual birds across the garden and fields until it weaves together into an hour of song.

You can probably download it for all I know and listen to it on your iPod as you hustle to work, with different titles for every day of the year, but it will no more be the real thing without the dark, cold air with that faintest promise of spring (yes, you can smell spring) and a slither of light on the horizon than a pack of supermarket factory eggs are the real thing.

The dusk chorus is spectacular at this time of year, too, building to a peak in about six weeks' time. It then dies away, although the dawn song continues well into summer. I often just stand in the garden at dusk at this time of year and let the sound wash around me. It is as proper a way to garden as anything else that I know.



Keeping Chickens at Home - Spring in the air?

Keeping Chickens at Home - Link Page

Keeping Chickens at Home - Link Page

Build Your Own Chicken House - Easy To Follow Plans

Get The Latest DEFRA Regulations On Keeping Chickens In The UK and Asian Bird Flu updates

Ascott Smallholder Supplies and Equipment.

Forsham Cottage Arks - High Quality Poultry & Waterfowl Housing.

PoultryOne's Guide to Raising Chickens - Free chicken articles.

Brilliant and very funny 'chicken' cartoons from Doug Savage - Check them out here.

Look here for your local agricultural merchants in the UK.

Poultry Page - Shows every breed of chicken imaginable. Well worth a look.

Find your nearest authorised UK Black Rock agent.

CIWF campaign for the improvement of intensively farmed animals.

Keeping Chickens at Home

Keeping Chickens at Home - Pigs might swim

Keeping Chickens at Home - Pigs Might Swim

Pinky & Perky Take To The Water. Three-month-old piglet twins Pinky and Perky love to do a few lengths in owners Marjorie and Craig Walsh's pool at Lucies Farm in Collets Green near Worcester. The couple decided to let the pigs take a dip to keep fit and now Craig believes that the quirky rearing method is the best way to keep the herd lean and mean.He says: "The whole point is to keep them as healthy and as fit as possible and they do seem to get very bored when they haven't got something to do. We basically had to launch the first pig into the pool off the back of a mini trailer. There were six people on stand by to pull it out in case it sank and Marjorie was at the bottom of the pool in scuba gear as a last resort. The pig went straight to the bottom - and then suddenly popped up again. After that we couldn't stop it swimming and it was almost impossible to get it back out.”

Keeping Chickens at Home

Keeping Chickens at Home - Building a Nest Box.

Keeping Chickens at Home - Building a Nest Box.

Chickens must have somewhere dark and snug to lay their eggs.

To build a nest box for your chickens is very simple. Build a box with wood, roughly 12"x12"x20"high, with a sloping roof to stop the chickens trying to roost on it and then forget to put a front and a back on it. Instead, put a piece of wood about 3" high on the bottom. With the front open, the chicken can easily pop in and out and with the back open, you can easily get at the eggs.

Check out the picture of one I made earlier in true Blue Peter fashion as a guide. Make sure the nest box is always placed lower than the perches in the house as chickens will always try to roost on the highest point in their house. Place the nesting box at the back of the house, so you can easily collect the eggs when you open the back of the chicken house in the morning.

Put some fresh straw in it and you're ready to go.


Keeping Chickens at Home

Keeping Chickens at Home - Some FAQ's

Keeping Chickens at Home - Some FAQ's

Q. "What does 'broody' mean?"

A. Going "broody" just refers to the instinct a hen has to stop laying eggs every day and to start sitting on the ones she's already laid, so that in 21 days they will hatch into chicks (provided a rooster has been mating with the hen). Some chickens "go broody" all the time. They are often bantam breeds, such as Silkies, or mixed breeds. Most purebreds, like Rhode Island Reds, were themselves not hatched by a mother hen. They were hatched in an egg incubator in a hatchery somewhere. You see, if you want a chicken that lays a lot of eggs for eating, you don't want one that still has the instinct to stop laying eggs and sit on her eggs all the time. You want one that has had all the broody instincts bred out of her so she'll lay for you year-round. So farmers over the years have raised up what are known as utility breeds; chickens that don't go broody and that lay almost all year 'round.

Q. "My chicks are growing fast. How can I tell which ones are hens and which are roosters?"

A. If you bought "sexed" chickens, then most likely all your chickens are females. If you bought "straight run" chicks, then 50% will be males. Professional chicken sexors are employed by hatcheries and sexing chickens is difficult. When you see some of your chicks displaying "dominance behaviors" or other fighting type behavior, that won't tell you anything. All my hens, when they were chicks, would fight, spar, act dominant to the others. The best way is to wait until it is no longer a chick and almost full grown. You will start to see pointed sickle and saddle feathers on a male. Sickle feathers are the two long tail feathers, and saddle feathers are the feathers that grow on a rooster's back right on top of the rump. They will come to a point versus being rounded. Wait until you hear a crow before you get rid of a suspected rooster if you are a novice; that's what I still do.

Q. "If my Rhode Island Red hen won't brood, what will make her set? Do they need a special laying feed to make them go broody?"

A. If a hen doesn't have the instinct to sit on her eggs, there's nothing you can do. She doesn't have the mothering instinct. Special foods won't help, nor will keeping her confined with her eggs or bringing in a rooster. You might be thinking of "layer pellets," which is simply food fed to hens that have started to lay eggs and hence need extra calcium and other nutrients to make strong shells. So leaving the eggs in the nest in hopes she'll sit on them is kind of wasting good eating eggs.

Q. "How often will a grown hen lay eggs? How many a day? What's the physiological reason that a chicken lays an egg?"

A. I do get a lot of emails asking me about the basic biology of chickens such as this. A "production" breed, or chickens that have been bred over the decades to really crank out the eggs might lay you an egg every 24-36 hours, and keep that up almost year 'round. That would be a good production breed. Secondly, hens don't need a rooster around at all to lay their maximum number of eggs. One article which answers some basic chicken biology questions is here. In addition, here is a picture that shows the internal sex organs of most birds, including chickens. You can see that the external genitalia are the same in males and females. This external part is called the cloacae. ("klo-AY-kuh.") The cloacae is the common chamber into which the intestinal, urinary, and generative canals discharge in birds, reptiles, amphibians, and many fishes. That is to say, chickens poop, pee, lay eggs, and mate all via the same hole.

Q. "We'll probably get a couple of chickens now, and then maybe another later. Is that okay?"

A. That's the one thing that's hard to do with chickens: Introduce a new one into a pen of other chickens. The new one gets picked on. There are tricks you can do to get around actual bloodshed, however. You can introduce even numbers of birds, like put five new chickens in with five original chickens. Or you can toss up the ages and ratios: Put in a dozen youngsters in with just three adults, for example, and the adults will be overwhelmed. Another thing to do is to let the original chickens chase the new ones around, but provide hiding places for the new ones. Put a second feeder and a second waterer at the opposite end of the chicken pen or coop, so the new chickens can always access food and water. Also, I'll refer you to a good link: http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/BRKRaisingChicks.html. Scroll down to the very last paragraph on that page for another technique on introducing new birds to a flock.

Q. "I am new at keeping chickens. I got them when they where born. Well, 2 of them have tried to attack me. I let them roam free and today one of them chased me into the house. I am afraid to go into my backyard. Have you ever heard of this?"

A. You really should keep your chickens in a pen of some kind. I would never let my chickens scare me out of my own yard. Take back the streets! I mean yard. Get those darned chickens in a pen where they belong. It will also keep them safer. If you let your chickens roam free, it is my personal opinion and experience that it's just a matter of time before they are harmed by predators.

Q. "What about parasites on or in my chickens? Do I have to deal with all that?"

A. You should dust your chickens every few months with an all-purpose pesticide dust, such as Sevin dust, or Hi-Yield Livestock & Garden dust. You can find canisters or bags of this stuff at any Agricultural Merchants. How I like to "dust" my chickens is to have a big shallow drawer or something, put sand or clean dirt in it, and mix a couple of cups of the pesticide dust in with it. Chickens love to take dust baths and will be dusting themselves in no time. Just leave the dusting bin in their run for a week or so. Also, chickens sometimes get worms. Just like puppies and kittens. Just for safety's sake, I like to worm my flock every 4-6 months. Buy a small bottle of chicken wormer from your local feed store, or you can order from the 'net, too. It simply involves adding some liquid medicine to their drinking water. Carefully follow the directions on the bottle.

Q. "What is coccidiosis?"

A. Coccidiosis (pronounced, “cock-sid-ee-O-sis”) is a common chicken disease. Poultry raised in crowded or unsanitary conditions (conditions that permit the build-up of a lot of oocysts in the environment) are at greatest risk of becoming infected. Wet areas around water fountains are a source of infection. Oocysts remain viable in litter for many months. In this way they can contaminate a farm from year to year. Oocysts are killed by freezing, extreme dryness and high temperatures. Several factors influence the severity of infection. Some of these are: An increase in the number of oocysts eaten causes an increase in the severity of the disease. Old birds are generally immune as a result of prior infection. Coccidiosis generally occurs more frequently during warmer weather (May to September). The most easily recognized clinical sign of severe coccidiosis is the presence of bloody droppings. Chickens droop, stop feeding, huddle together and by the fourth day blood begins to appear in the droppings. The greatest amount of blood appears by day five or six and by the eighth or ninth day the bird is either dead or on the way to recovery. Keep chicks, feed and water away from droppings as much as possible. Place water vessels on wire frames to eliminate a concentration of wet droppings, in which the chicks can walk to pick up or spread the disease. Keep litter dry and stirred frequently. Remove wet spots and replace with dry litter. Avoid overcrowding. If coccidiosis does break out, start treatment immediately. Amprolium (the stuff they put in medicated chick feed) or one of the sulpha-based drugs (such as Sulmet, which you can get at the feed store) is usually recommended. Follow directions on bottle to the letter.

Q. "Do your chicken eggs have little red spots in them?"

A. The blood spot that many people mistakenly take as a mark of a fertilized egg is actually blood from the hen. Not all eggs will have them. It happens when the hen is creating the egg in her body and a tiny blood vessel somewhere along the process ruptures and a tiny bit of chicken blood gets mixed into the formation process. People have long thought all sorts of erroneous things about chicken eggs: That fertilized ones are healthier, that free-range eggs are so much better for you, that organic ones have less cholesterol, that the blood spot is a mark of fertilization, etc.

Q. "When you say you can raise chickens in the city, you really mean in the suburbs, right? One can't raise chickens in a high rise apartment."

A. I raised a hen from a baby chick when I lived in an apartment once. It was a bantam breed and so only grew as large as a parrot, which people keep as pets all the time, and chickens can live outside. Except unlike a parrot, my species of bird would eat my kitchen scraps and give me eggs. The only thing I would do differently is raise two chicks at a minimum, as one chick gets very, very lonely. My apartment had a patio, and I don't see why a person couldn't modify a chicken tractor design to work for a patio. I personally think it's not too nice to keep a dog cooped up in an apartment, and people do that all the time. It might be challenging, but why couldn't city folks keep pets that are super practical and give them fresh eggs? Couldn't you collect the chicken droppings and put them in your planters on your patio where you are growing some tomatoes or flowers?

Q. "I prefer organic versus store-bought eggs and I have read all kind of hen house horror stories, so I would prefer to buy my family's eggs from chickens which don't spend their lives caged up in misery and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones."

A. It may not be supporting my own cause, but I am compelled to say: The only real difference you will be getting with backyard eggs is that they will be fresher, and a lot of people like that. They can have more brightly colored yolks. Otherwise they are essentially the same as store-bought eggs. I don't really like the idea of battery hens standing on wire the whole year or so they use them, but it might be a necessary evil. But even backyard hens have to live in a pen, because even city folks have raccoons, dogs and hawks to contend with. If I let my chickens roam the yard, they would be eaten in no time. But you're right; backyard hens definitely are not on wire floors and are able to scratch about happily in the straw or dirt, eat grass and food scraps, fly up to perches, lay in the sun, take dust baths, fight and/or preen each other, interact with each other, etc. I know egg industry hens are sometimes fed feed with antibiotics in it, but I've never heard of hens being given hormones.

Q. "Isn't it true that some free-range, organic, vegetarian hens lay eggs with 35% less cholesterol than regular eggs?"

A. It might indeed be true that the new "Omega 3" eggs developed at the University of Nevada can have up to 19% less cholesterol than regular eggs. However, it's the folks who are producing them who are reporting this; not an independent researcher. Foodwatch.com says Omega 3 eggs "do not have any less cholesterol but they have more omega 3 fatty acids." Foodwatch.com also says, "Despite these differences, all eggs have approximately the same amount of protein, total fat and cholesterol." These engineered eggs don't claim to be "organic" eggs. They are not free-range eggs. They just claim to have more Omega 3 fatty acids. What jumps out at me is that they are doing a lot of work (genetic selection, restricted feed, etc.) to make a relatively little change in eggs. The hens are still in cages and the hens are fed a fairly unnatural diet. So to me the eggs might be slightly healthier but are not particularly "natural." I would say it would be up to each individual consumer to decide which is their own personal lesser of two evils. Some folks who have high cholesterol might be grateful for any small change in an egg; others will still consider these to be battery hens that are caged and the resulting eggs are not free-range nor organically produced. Also, you might find some farms that make fairly amazing claims about their eggs. Buyer beware of such claims.

Q. No matter what I put my chicken's water in, they get dirt in it! Do you have any tricks for keeping their water supply unfouled?

A. They sell automatic watering systems, like the one seen here. But they require you to have them always hooked up to a water source, and most back yard poultry keepers don't get that complicated. I've used the plastic one gallon gravity feed ones (you have to refill them often), the 5 gallon plastic Dura Founts (two of them leaked/cracked on me), a plain plastic shoebox but placed very high on some boards and bricks, and other methods. The problem I have with the galvanized gravity feed ones is that although they can hold a lot of water, the actual reservoir holds only about a cup of water, and it gets dirty fast. So the chickens, although using a five gallon waterer, only have access to the trough of a cup or so of dirty warm water. That bothers me every time I look at it. Currently I'm using a five gallon bucket. You must keep the water topped off or the chickens won't be able to reach the water easily. With gravity feed waterers, you have to go into the poopy chicken pen to remove it, open it, refill it, and then lug 5 gallons of water back into the chicken pen. The bucket can be filled from outside the pen by sticking the garden hose through the wire; no top to unscrew. The bucket water level is right near the head-level of a standard breed bird. The water surface is high enough to keep most scratched-up dirt out of it. The dirt that does land in the water settles down to the bottom of the bucket. It is heavy so if the birds fly onto it, it won't tip over like a smaller bucket.

Q. "I gave my chickens a few worms. They loved those. Is it OK to do so?"

A. You will find that chickens are better than pigs for eating anything. Get a pretty ceramic bowl or container (I use a kid's sand pail), set it next to your kitchen sink, and throw all your food scraps into it. This will become your "chicken bucket." Then feed these scraps to the chickens. Empty the container daily so as not to breed germs. Dump the "chicken bucket" of food scraps into an old metal cake pan or the like that you leave in the chicken run. This way the scraps are kept off the ground and droppings. You can then easily dispose of any food that the chickens didn't eat that was left in the cake pan. You will find that chickens hardly refuse anything. It gives them food variety, too, and you will feel like you are not wasting food but recycling it. Think you can't put scrambled eggs or cooked chicken meat into the chicken bucket? Think again; those are among their favorites. I used to put even raw meat scraps in, but I've read that raw meat can transmit toxoplasmosis to animals, including chickens, and I wouldn't want myself or my kids to then come in contact with contaminated chicken manure. This is especially important for pregnant women. Some chicken fanciers are wholly against feeding human food to chickens. I just don't understand how some leftover Cheerios, which are enriched with vitamins, or bread or pasta made with enriched flour could possibly be bad for chickens. One time a mouse made a nest under one of my chickens' nest boxes, and when we moved the box, about 7 baby mice went scampering. My hens ate those baby mice so fast you wouldn't believe it. Chickens are the ultimate omnivores. Oh, and chickens love fresh grass clippings; be sure to put your garden clippings into the chicken pen. (Earthworms and other bugs, actually, can be carriers of microscopic parasitic chicken worms. My personal solution is to administer worming medicine via their water every 6 months versus never letting them eat worms or bugs.)

Q. "What kind of chicken food do I buy for my laying hens?"

A. Very simple: One should always provide free-choice commercial chicken food. Chicks should be fed "chick starter" clear up until you get your first egg, then switch to "layer pellets." That's it. Cracked corn or scratch grains are not sufficient. A chicken fed on only "chicken scratch" will be malnourished and fat. Q. "I was watching my chickens and they are pecking the feathers off of each other a lot. Could feeding them straight barley for a long time make them pick?" A. Absolutely. Chickens have been bred from the wild jungle fowl. In the wild, chickens eat beetles, worms, mice, carrion, bugs, flies, seeds, grasses, etc. They are omnivores, which means they eat meat and vegetable matter. They are omnivores in much the same way we humans are omnivores. So feeding them plain barley for a long time would be just as if you ate plain barley for a long time. You would start having strong cravings for protein, vitamins and minerals. You would become malnourished. Your chickens are picking each other and eating the feathers for protein and other trace minerals. "Scratch grains," such as barley kernels and cracked corn, are just extra treats for chickens. They should never be their only food. You should always provide commercially prepared chicken food for your captive chickens. Always. It should be "free choice," too, which means a supply should always be available and should never run out. So go out today and buy an all purpose chicken feed like Triple Duty or Chicken Mash or Crumbles. If your chickens are all older and are egg layers, you can get away with feeding Layer Pellets, as it is nutritionally complete for laying hens. Don't feed this to chicks or chickens who haven't started laying yet. They need Chick Starter until you see your first egg. A 25kg bag of chicken feed costs about £6. Also, put grass clippings in your pen as often as you can, as this helps cut down on pecking because it gives them something to do and is very healthy for them, as regular chicken feed, although nutritionally complete, has no green leafy living matter in it. Also provide grit (small gravel rocks you buy at the feed store) for your chickens.

Q. "What kind of bedding do you put in a hen house or chicken run?"

A. I can only speak from my own experiences, and I've tried a number of things: Sand, pea gravel, wood shavings, straw, etc. The main thing is that you want something that promotes drainage. If you have a muddy chicken run, then it is more conducive to disease. Some people throw straw in their chicken tractor or run, and then when it gets layered with poop and moisture, they throw on another layer of straw. This works, except for eventually, you have to remove the dirty straw, and in my experience the layers become very matted and almost woven/cemented together so that even with a shovel it is hard to get up. So I would suggest using one of those compressed bales of wood shavings for about £5. A bale for three hens lasts a long time and make things look "petting zoo" cute. It also doesn't mat together quite as bad as straw, you can layer fresh wood shavings on top of old, and it absorbs standing water or mud which can harbor an excess of pathogens. If you have very well-draining soil in your coop, or live where it is dry and warm a lot, you can also use no litter; just bare earth. Just rake out the dried poop occasionally.

Q. “Tell your site readers that chicken wire will not keep their chickens safe from dogs. We built a chicken Ark and still our dogs tore through the chicken wire and killed our two chickens.”

A. I’m so sorry to hear that. I will mention again about the danger of dogs around chickens. Determined dogs might indeed be able tear lightweight chicken wire off of its framework. I will advise builders to use lots and lots of extra long staples when attaching the chicken wire to their hen houses. I will also suggest that if using an ark to house chickens, the safest way is to keep the pen inside a fully fenced yard. That way, no stray or roaming dogs can come into your yard. If you have your own dogs sharing your yard with your chickens, I must simply say that there is no real way to fully trust dogs around chickens. If you have dogs, an ark may not be appropriate for you. You would have to use something very dog-proof to keep your dogs away from your chickens. Also, if a dog can’t tear through the chicken wire, it still might be able to tip over a very lightweight ark. So if you are going to leave your dogs unattended around your chicken ark, I would suggest building one or else put some kind of heavy object such as an old tire on top of it.

Q. "I've been told by several people that bantam hens have a very good disposition and are exceptionally easy to manage. In your experience are there any breeds that do better than others as pets?"

A. I've tried a lot of breeds, and ultimately, they are all chickens. In my experience, how "pet-like" a chicken is is directly related to how much it was handled while it was growing up. It will be unafraid of humans if humans handled it a lot and hand-fed it, etc. Some chicken fanciers will tell you that some breeds are born friendlier than others. My personal opinion? It's dependent on how much human contact they had when growing up. Some breeds will *look* more pet like, because they are fluffier, or slower, or have shorter legs. Remember, they are birds. They are all flighty, unless you work against their nature and hand-rear them a lot. Get some baby chicks, brood them in your coat pockets, only hand feed them, etc., and your chickens will hang around you forever. But I don't have that kind of time, and I’d hate to think what my coat pockets would smell like. :)

Q. "Would my chickens have the capability and the desire to fly out of our yard?"

A. Oh Yes. The capability is there. I even keep particularly skittish hens’ wings trimmed so they can’t take off. No, chickens can’t really “fly,” but they can get over fences. If you trim the end feathers of ONE wing only, they will fly in an ark and not get anywhere. It doesn't hurt them a bit.

Q. "I was wondering if the smell is very bad if we are good about keeping our chicken area really clean. It seems like it is not too bad as long as the area is kept clean. Is that correct?"

A. Cleaner always equals less smelly. I think you have to let the poop accumulate for a LONG time before it gets really smelly. Also, a fresh dropping smells. A dried out dropping doesn't. Wet area equals smell, dry area equals no smell.

Q. "Do you notice a rat problem starting up because of the chicken feed that is out? If so, what do you usually do to curb that problem?"

A. I've noticed a few mice, but they've never got to the "problem" level at all. They come around looking for the kitchen scraps I feed my chickens. But then one time my hens ate a bunch of baby mice they found under their nest box. So there you go :) I also keep my chicken feed outside, but in a metal rubbish bin. I tried plastic; the mice chewed through it!

Q. "What should be done for chickens in the Winter?

A. Make sure the drinkers are changed daily as the water will probably have frozen. Choose hardy breeds like Black Rocks who have been bred to withstand colder weather. Keep the henhouse well bedded with fresh straw and make sure there are no drafts. I put an old door against the henhouse door to stop the wing blowing in through the entrance hatch. When its cold, have the run area sheltered from the wind. They will eat a little more in cold weather as they will be using more energy keeping warm.

Keeping Chickens at Home - Some FAQ's

Keeping Chickens at Home - Eggs and the city!

Keeping Chickens at Home

Eggs and the city

By Christine Jeavans
BBC News Online


Urban dwellers across the land are being encouraged to get in touch with nature by keeping hens in their back gardens. But does it make sense - and what do the chickens think about it?

With Tango... or is it Cha Cha?
How practical is it to keep two hens in the small patch of green most townies have at their disposal? What about the foxes?

Two days into my life as an urban hen wrangler and there's no doubt about it, I am being told off by a chicken.

Every time I go into the garden her clucking takes on an accusatory tone and she approaches the end of the run and fixes me with a beady glare.

It is evident that she wants to be let out to roam around the apparently thrilling habitat that is my garden but I have been told to keep her and her friend in the run for the first few days so they don't try to "home" to Oxfordshire.

This feisty madam, whom I have named Tango, and her pal Cha Cha are my charges for the next few weeks.

They are beautiful South American Araucana hens which lay pale blue eggs. And, as befits such funky chickens, they have eschewed a wood and wire coop for an eglu - an iMac-style bright plastic hen house complete with run, feeders and a sun/rain shade.


The eglu: Lo-rise living for city chicks
It has an "eggport" so humans can access the minimalist nestbox (urban hens don't do straw) and an easy-to-clean droppings tray - meaning for an extra green halo you can brush the guano straight into your compost bin.

The eglu (£325 including two hens and feed) was dreamt up by four industrial design students as part of a final year project at the Royal College of Art. After graduating they decided to bring chicken-keeping to the urban masses.

"We had a hunch that a lot of people wanted to keep hens but didn't know how,