Posted on 07/26/2021 11:23:09 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
At the start of the pandemic, when daring to go to the supermarket meant staring at empty shelves where the dairy products, canned goods, and yeast packets used to be, some people decided that they'd adopt chickens to give themselves a steady supply of fresh eggs, or just to take control of something in their lives.
But now that everything feels slightly different and many of us are inching our way back to normal, those chickens have become just another responsibility—or perhaps a reminder of what life was like twelve-plus months ago. As a result, some people are giving up their backyard birds, which is proving to be stressful for the chickens themselves, and for the organizations that rescue roosters and hens.
According to Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Roo Crew is one of those animal advocacy groups, and they're struggling to pay for veterinary care for the birds they already have. They've been inundated with so many requests to take in abandoned or unwanted chickens that they've had to start turning them down, and referring those people to other organizations. "Right now, currently, we're closed for intake," Julia Magnus, an animal rights attorney and Chicago Roo Crew volunteer, told the outlet. "Because we have too many [birds] and our vet bills are tremendous."
This isn't just happening in Chicago either: Tamerlaine Sanctuary & Preserve in Montague, New Jersey told the West Milford Messenger that they've had to stop taking in new birds after having to accept 20 hens in the past few months. The sanctuary houses around 150 birds, and it might spend as much as $20,000 every year on veterinary care for the chickens.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
These are folks that still have to learn that eggs actually come out of the chickens butt, and you want them to slaughter the thing for supper!?!?
Eating the chicken is easy. Dispatching one for the first time and then prepping it to eat is the hard part, especially if it’s your first time and you only have a handful of birds that were until recently treated as pets and not livestock.
I’m not going to fault someone who hasn’t lived a life that involved slaughtering your own meat to feel unprepared when thrust into that situation as an adult. If anything, it’s an opportunity for some enterprising hillbilly to get a chicken prep truck together and start making house calls.
For only twenty five dollars per chicken, I’ll pick up your chicken, professionally dispatch and dress it, and return it to you in a vaccuum sealed plastic bag. Plenty of buji would-be farmers out there (who already paid well over five hundred dollars to kit up their yard for a few dozen eggs and a lot of chicken crap on their back porch) would jump at the chance to brag about how rustic and “back to roots” their next dinner party was by serving chickens raised in their own yards just like a real farmer.
I think that $20K might include a lot of counseling and group therapy sessions. Being cooped up near a bunch of potential disease vectors can be stressful.
I won’t put too fine of a point on it, but I’ve always used a killing cone for butchering chickens, but my Grandma always used the ‘chop their heads off’ method...in inner-city Milwaukee where I grew up.
No strangers ever messed with my Grandma, and we kids NEVER sassed her, LOL! :)
Mine always liked field mice and those AWFUL Japanese Beetles.
like watching chicken tear into a cowpie looking for things to eat.
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LOL.... Yep lots of good grain left in the cow pie for them to eat.
I have one in the freezer all ready to go. Just waiting for a break in the heat to heat up the kitchen and roast it.
“...nests of newborn rats.”
My Lab used to like those, too. ‘Popcorn Chicken,’ LOL!
Roosters are only needed for FERTILE eggs. Mature hens produce eggs on a regular basis whether they have mated or not, for varying periods of up to 10 months of the year, then they go through a “moult”, usually about December. The existing wing and tail feathers drop off and new ones grow in. When the moult is finished the hens resume laying eggs, about March.
Some hens are either poor producers of eggs, or none at all. These are detected by a physical palpation of the hen’s pelvic area, to find the distance between the “pin bones”. Those with less than two fingers space between the pin bones are culled (OK, killed and dressed out), those with three fingers or more spacing between bones are probably good layers, and are retained. Chickens have a productive life up to three years.
You CAN NOT RETURN CHICKENS! WTH.
Only once I had to decapitate one - she was paralyzed and I had to put her out of her misery.
So by the time they die they're not much good for eating anyway - unless it's a SHTF situation.
People complicate things way too much. I have 3 chickens in the back yard. I built a nice henhouse from culled lumber. I used a piece of wood from the bathroom remodel for the bottom and a bunch of cut 2x4’s some siding and a sheet of plywood from home depot. All damaged or scraps. I had some old shingles in the attic which I made a roof from. The only wood I bought new was the two 4x4 fence posts cut in half to make the corners. My wife spent more on paint than I spent on wood.
Then we put up a 500 dollar dog kennel to keep the chickens in and the dogs out. Chicken wire roof to keep raccoons and birds out. I put a 4” ABS pipe and a couple of elbows to make a feeder. A 50 dollar chicken waterer to keep them hydrated. We let them out some days to forage.
We can go away for 11 days and the chickens will be just fine. Worst case scenario is we have 33 eggs when we get back. I tell you what, if you crack open one of our free range organic sustainable home grown chicken eggs next to the one from the store, the difference is eye popping and jaw dropping. Huge golden yolks and nice thick shells. You just don’t get them.
Where we used to live we had several people who raised chickens for eggs but could not stand to slaughter them.
So we ran a chicken retirement home.
I will bet these urban “farmers” regularly eat delicious chicken of all manner. Not ever thinking that their birds are exactly the same. “Why do I need to kill my chickens when chicken comes from the grocery store?”
“The sanctuary houses around 150 birds, and it might spend as much as $20,000 every year on veterinary care for the chickens” REALLY??? $133 per chicken per year???
Well said.
Yeah, I don’t fault anyone for not living like I do. HOWEVER, I DO NOT want to hear any comments from them about the way *I* choose to live. And I don’t want to hear you whining and sniffling when my steer, Weber, goes to ‘the spa’ this next spring. ;)
You animal advocates* and Mother Government types need to clear off my land!
*I am a HUGE animal advocate. I would never purposefully harm a living critter (mammal, fish or fowl) other than for food for my own table.
OK. I would kill a rat, or a raccoon or a woodchuck that keeps STEALING from my garden or bird feeder. And I have plinked off the random pocket gopher for moving target practice, LOL!
For those of you that have chickens or birds....just be aware of histoplasmosis.
Many people haven’t heard of it. You can see what it does to your organs on a CT scan. Crafty disease that does many different things to the body.
Send me the chickens. I have room in my new chicken house for them. Also my electric pressure cooker is empty of chicken and noodles.
I never knew that about the pelvic spacing on a hen. Who knew they had ‘breeder hips?’ Thanks!
I’ve always bought/raised breeds that were superb layers. My favorites being Buff Orrpington and any in the Wyandotte breed.
That's what we did in the late 1950's when some of the chicks we got as pets turned out to be roosters. Others turned out to be hens and kept us supplied with eggs.
These are detected by a physical palpation of the hen’s
pelvic area, to find the distance between the “pin bones”.
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I grew up with my father raising 3-4 hundred layers. Thinning
out the flock was always there. My mother made chicken salad
sandwiches for a local business that served as a exchange stop
for a passenger bus line. Chicken Salad and Egg sandwiches.
In my growing up years the only way I could eat chicken was fried
to a crisp.
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