rescue hens??

[pittsbirder]

ok so my co-workers got some chickens after i did however their chickens stopped laying almost immediatley and not much for about 4 months..i learned at first they were only feeding them cracked corn..i didnt want to be bossy cause im new to chicken farming myself so i hinted at chicken feed. well they finally started on scratch but I said thats better than straight corn, but kinda like candy. so after they watched my child, they wouldn't accept $ so i bought them a bag of crumbles hoping they would get the hint and feed the girls right. they do get lots of good scraps however! so they wanted rid of the non layers so i decided i cld do it since they couldnt harvest their own. well i decided to keep them for a few days to feed them a proper diet and today i got an egg. i was going to harvest them on sat but now after 4 days i got an egg. i have no idea how old they are...i myself cant keep 3 more hens should i harvest them, or wait a week or two and if they start to lay use it as a teaching tool to the owners? i dont want to kill good laying hens but i dont have room for them otherwise. Any suggestions?

 

[TweeTea]

Interesting experiment. I would keep hold of them and track any change in eggs following the change in diet. Ask the previous owners if they want them back if they start laying, if not you could always give them away to someone else. If it turns out they are not laying at all you can always decide to lop the heads off then.

Best of luck and let us know how the diet/egg tracking goes if you decide to do it