Are chickens today more 'delicate' than those our grandparents had?

[jmf_srf]

All I know is it's probubly the breed, My grandparents-in-law live just next door and they raise Hamburgs (I, on the other hand, had orps and sex links). A raccoon ate all of my chickens and theirs are still all out running around happily. Theirs free-range most of their feed and they have had them for many many years. So I guess it could be genetics being stronger making a better chicken, but more likely I think it's just the breed.

 

[ChicKat]

I align with the view expressed by metalSmitten (post 4)

I also think that in our grandparents day they had and expected a LOT more deaths of their poultry, and they had a lot more chickens than many of us have, and they were constantly replenishing their flocks.

Also too--- science has provided us so much more information than they ever had, We simply know more than they even imagined....we have so much more tecnical advantage than they had.... and we have higher standards and higher expectations than they had.

ahh the good-old-days.

And, it occurs to me that the climate had warmed, and chickens are at greater risk now.

 

[vjbakke]

I think for us they are more " pets". For older generations if you wanted eggs and chicken to eat you had to raise them yourself or pay a lot for store bought and people back then just didn't have the money. For us we like them as pets and like knowing where our food comes from.

 

[CarolynF]

I love what people are saying! This is so much fun, thank you all for participating. I hope we get lots more to join in.

 

[mulewagon]

I think it was easier to keep chickens on the side back when more people had big livestock like horses, cows, or goats. They would have the barn and grain already, and the chickens would kind of live in the margins.

Also, people with livestock would usually have guns, and hunt. A lot of predators that take backyard chickens have moved into my area in the last 30 years. And people didn't hesitate to shoot a cat or dog that took chickens. My mother told me how her grandparents had to have their pet tomcat shot because he started chicken-killing. They asked their son to do it because he had better eyes. It was like the rabid dog scene from To Kill a Mockingbird - he stationed himself in an upstairs window of the house and waited for the cat to come up the walk. They were unhappy to do it, but the chickens were too important.

They didn't do the same things we do for the chickens, but they took a lot of care of them. My mother recalls how her grandmother and great-aunt would run out when it started raining, and flap their aprons to herd the chickens into the coop "so they wouldn't look up into the rain and drown". It's sad to think of those hard-working women wasting so much effort on a superstition!

She also remembers them killing a non-laying hen for dinner, and how disappointed they were when she turned out to be full of eggs. Evidently the production of one hen was a serious amount of their food.

 

[CarolynF]

MuleWagon...

Very interesting stories! Thank you for passing those along.

 

[triplepurpose]

Quote:
This reminded me of a couple of family farms I visited in Austria a couple of years ago--very much the old-world-small-homestead experience. They each had several hens and maybe a rooster or two that just wandered around the barn area freely. They mostly stuck around the barns with the cows and goats and pigs, finding plenty to eat in the straw, in the manure, in slop in the pig pen, and around the feeding stalls for the dairy animals. They drank out of puddles or out of the other animals' water troughs. I don't think anyone deliberately fed them at all, at least not during the summer months. They had no special housing or nesting accommodations. They presumable roosted in the stalls or in the hayloft. The family would gather the eggs wherever they found them, usually leaving one in the nest, so that the hen would keep laying in the same spot. One of the hens had just hatched chicks when I was there, and no one had noticed her absence till she showed up with the chicks one day--they never did know where she was nesting. Some of these chickens looked like mutts, but some were of a venerable heritage breed native to Austria called "Sulmthaler." I'm sure a martin or hawk probably carried off one once in a while, but by and large they seemed to be doing just fine--in fact they looked quite contented, healthy, sleek, and spry.

I don't have a barn or cows or any of this, but I still like to hold for myself this lovely example of "benign neglect" as an ideal to work toward...

 

[oldchickenman1]

Mulewagon

I don't know about chickens but turkeys of a certain age will look up and drown during a rain. One of my customers in our restaurant had several thousand turkeys being raised in a field a few years back and it was truly amazing how many hundreds of the turkeys drowned during an 1.5 to 2 inch rain simply because they looked up and drowned. Needless to say he never tried to raise turkeys in the field again

Herman

 

[gale65]

I used to have chickens about 20 yrs ago and never did all that stuff and never had problems. I had a run made with chicken wire (no top), and they stayed in the barn at night. Never gave vitamins past a couple of weeks, never gave probiotics, acv, ice, etc. Someone in another thread where I mentioned this said I was just lucky. I had friends nearby with chickens also (I borrowed their silky hen to hatch out some heavy layer eggs) and they didn't do any of that either.

 

[CarolynF]

Quote:
Herman, that's not rain... that's a lake up in the air! They probably didn't even need to look up!