Backyard chickens

[pompier]

At he beginning of this thread I had four chickens.I had to get rid of two.They turned out to be fighting chickens.They had to go.Thats why I replaced them with the Easter eggers.

Ah yes, cock fighting seems to be ingrained in the populations of west Texas and New Mexico. The old timers really love it and I don't see it going away anytime soon.

 

[jskeen]

Just tripped across this thread and thought I'd toss in a couple of cents. I briefly had a couple of chickens as a kid, but for the most part couldn't keep them because my Dad worked as a field supervisor for Tyson Foods for 30 some odd years. He was in and out of a half dozen production hen houses every day, checking bird weight, food allotment, egg production, ect. He also did post mortem exams, evaluated sick birds and distributed medications as needed. Needless to say he was not really keen on getting home at the end of the day and dealing with pet chickens

But I did ultimately absorb a bit of info by osmosis about them. In summary, most of the deficiencies associated with processed chicken and eggs are diet and environmental. You can take a day old chick out of a production pullet house, put it in the yard and let it grow up running loose eating a good diet supplemented with whatever it can catch as it wanders about, and in due time, assuming you got a hen rather than a rooster (not always easy to tell at 1 day old) it will lay eggs (probably every other day or so) that will taste great, and be in all ways superior to what you get at the grocery store. After a relatively long happy life the hen can be converted into chicken soup that can be equally superior to that made from commercially processed chicken.

Now, will this chicken lay as many eggs as a feed store rhode island red or leghorn? Probably not, as breeding will tell, but the difference will be minor. Same with proportion of meat from the final processing. It will probably have more breastmeat, but not a lot, and the quality will be pretty equal. The single largest factor is diet, and second is environment/activity level. Breeding is a distant third, IMHO.

Of course, I haven't raised chickens in 30 years, and Dad still can't stand the darn things unless they are on a plate, so YMMV.
James

 

[Oldsarge]

I used to watch the feral banty roosters go at it at the San Diego Zoo when I was a kid. I loved it! AFIC, cock fighting is fun so long as you don't put on those murderous steel spur extensions. Just let them have it out with their natural weaponry and after a few minutes one will skedaddle and you pick up the winner and go home. Unfortunately, that isn't the way the cockfighting aficionados want it done. They seem to have this unnatural craving for blood . . . so long as it's the chickens'. So, it's nasty and if I ever found out about a ring operating near me, the local gendarmes would get a call really quick.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

I saw this article in my Facebook newsfeed & thought of this thread.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/20...npr&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130711

 

[Michaelshane]

My Easter eggers....

 

[Phineas Lamour]

Nice looking easter eggers. I just got these two bantam americaunas.

I built this coop with a crate from work and some wood and chicken wire.

I am planning to get two more hens probably next weekend.