Where do you retire chickens if you don't want them killed? - Page 7

I had begun to think I just didn't have enough chicken poop.  We had 7 bantam chickens in a 100ftx100ft suburban yard.

So, one day I noticed the EE hen dating the Silkie rooster.  The following day I put her egg under an eternally broody hen.  21 days later I got this:


When it was time for the chick and its nanny to move out of their brooder box, we noticed somebody else had laid a nest full of new poopers behind her brooderbox, so we put those eggs under another eternally broody hen and 21 days later we got this:


This summer, with my newly enhanced quantities of chicken poop I planted new flowerbeds with the composting "soil" I made with kitchen scraps (mostly fruit peels) and coop poop from my little chickens and got this:



For my family of 5 we collect about 2 to 4 eggs a day from our flock of 13 bantam chickens.  Its hardly worth keeping for eggs!  But for the poop, they're priceless.  You should SEE my beans in the summer!   But my roses are what make me happiest.  This is my good friend, The Rose From Aldi:


As an added bonus, the chickens eat these off the roses and the sound of chickens' crunching these like popcorn is very satisfying to hear :


The first time I even heard of backyard chickens was from a news article from Oak Park, IL, wherein people kept a few hens in their gardens for their chicken poop.  It hadn't even occurred to me that the chickens might lay eggs.  Truly.  I bet there are others out there who just want the yard candy that is a chicken in their garden.

If you can afford to feed them, you can keep them on and use them to make good fertilizer/compost.

so........... what have you decided for your chickens?

Quote:

Originally Posted by bendystar 

We added 4 new chickens to the existing 3 in our backyard.  The 3 original chickens are starting to lay again.  I'm not sure what the future hold for those girls.  I'll keep them as long as I can. 

 

We don't want to eat them, and I don't want them killed.  But if they get old and their quality of life declines and they are at risk of spreading disease in the rest of the flock, we may have them put down at the local exotic pet vet. But I guess we'll cross that road when we come to it.  I imagine I'll treat them just like any other pet we own and it'll be case by case.

 

I'm really glad I asked this question since the answers varied widely.  It was nice to get so many different perspectives.  I guess I'm somewhere in between thinking of them as livestock and pets.  We have a small yard and we like the eggs...so...We'll just see. 

 

Thanks all for your responses!

 hmmmm......... small yard sounds like good poop collecting............. !   Here's a website from England I found a few weeks ago about small yards and chickens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrewJ982gdY&feature=share

Quote:

Originally Posted by artsyrobin 

i just plan on keeping them- they gave me eggs faithfully, they have a forever home....

I feel the same way!

http://www.yourchickens.co.uk/news/keeping_chickens_in_small_spaces_1_915191#.TworK-lDXq0.facebook

Oh whoops, this is the link to chickens in small yards., the other link I posted for you was just chickens in pretty yards.  I guess we can be both small, and pretty too!