Recent content by six_chooks_for_now

@mscallisto thank you for sharing the thread

@mscallisto & @AidKD thank you for the responses. I thought I did the right thing but now I’m second guessing myself. I was super concerned about leaving her too long in that state if she was suffering so I didn’t think to research online first. I didn’t really know it was an option to try and...

Thanks - I felt it was what I should do. It just seemed like too much damage to her. This morning I was reading about someone who had treated fox injuries and I started to wonder what kind of injuries were humanely treatable with a general success rate in case we encounter something like this...

Hey all, Sadly two neighbor dogs got into my flock yesterday. One hen was dead and 16 birds were missing when I arrived home (my neighbor called me and animal control, who came and got the dogs). My husband and I and two sets of neighbors found all but 4 of them by last night - 2 hens and 2...

So from a lot of people's responses, it sounds like we should raise all of our chickens together rather than raising the boys separately. Does anyone also keep a bachelor pad? Is there any reason to do this if we plan on eating the ones that don't work out?

Good to know! This is the first time we have had males.

Just for fun - here were our first contenders (that I named just now for the sake of this haha). Wiley will move on to the second round and Goose will move on into the soup :p

@NatJ Okay that makes me feel better! We have the means to separate and dispatch immediately if there are problems. We've definitely had bullying in the bachelor pen so I am looking forward to having less of them, and selectively breeding towards a less disruptive flock (my hope!).

I'm okay with having them all together if there isn't mayhem. I thought it was a no to have two or more roosters with such a small number of hens? But we can certainly see how they act!

We only have 6 hens right now. We were supposed to get more after we got the boys but there was a shortage of pullets everywhere with the covid stock piling! I was hoping we would get a pullet or two in with our boys, but they did a fantastic job of sexing all males ha! Never works in the...

Yes! We certainly are set up to overwinter a few and it was our intention to keep one or two as boss Bachelor (tell me if that's a bad idea..) when we bring in new cockerel growers. I think that this is really good advice as we would not like to stress our ladies out. We would just choose not...

That makes sense! We had made a small list of sorts - good layers, mellow temperament (not stressy, aggressive, but also not too friendly), decent body weight for table birds. I tried to judge them based on chicken conformation like I would a horse, but really not my strong suit haha! We would...

Thank you! After reading some of the other comments I realized that the Brahma's behavior was unlikely to get better and he will be going in the soup (at some point). Good to know about the matriarchal hen - she is very protective of HER hens so I will prepare myself for some scuffling as the...

I just wanted to say that he reminds me of a renaissance painting of a war general (or something) :D

Welcome!! PNW (outside Portland) here too :) Love your flock!