Killer Chickens - The Movie.
Be afraid....be very afraid!!
Keeping chickens at home
Labels: chicks, cockerel, keeping chickens at home
Everything a beginner ever wanted to know about keeping & raising chickens at home in the garden or back yard. This site will show you the basics of keeping & raising chickens; What type of chicken should I get? What shall I feed them? What should I house them in? How many eggs will I get? and lots more. So if you've ever asked "How do I keep & raise chickens at home?" I will show you how easy it is and how much fun it can be ;-)
Be afraid....be very afraid!!
Labels: chicks, cockerel, keeping chickens at home
Keith Parkins
Woman prepares to fight for her chickens: Kent resident will speak to City Council about ban on poultry in small yards
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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
Labels: chicks, chucks, cockerel, hens, keeping chickens at home, pigs, pork, sausages
Associated Press
Labels: chicks, chucks, cockerel, hens, keeping chickens at home, poultry
Chick: A hatchling
Labels: chucks, cockerel, hens, keeping chickens at home, poultry, rooster
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


Keeping Chickens at Home

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.
