The most commonly available hens have been bred to be good egg layers. At the same time, backyard farmers often use enhanced feed, light or other tools to prompt hens to lay constantly. After keeping up that pace for 18 months to two years, however, hens often develop reproductive problems including oviduct diseases that can kill them, veterinarians say. However, healthy hens can live for years longer, up to a decade after they stop laying.
What? No. That is what the industry does, not what the backyard farmer does! What backyard farmer do any of us know of that uses these 'tools' to make chooks lay more? What egg factory on the other hand doesn't? Ok, some now do, but that's pretty recent a development, generally speaking... As people have already said... What an ignorant load of baloney. Skewed, deliberately misinformed and misinforming. A prime example of why the mainstream media news is best classified as retarded on average.
Hundreds of chickens, sometimes dozens at a time, are being abandoned each year at the nation’s shelters from California to New York as some hipster farmers discover that hens lay eggs for two years, but can live for a good decade longer, and that actually raising the birds can be noisy, messy, labor-intensive and expensive.
Hundreds of chickens a year does not equal 'backfiring' --- compare that to millions of dogs and cats per year being surrendered or dumped or caught roaming free. By those standards, pet keeping is backfiring. Critics? No, since they have no true fact-based critique to offer, just noisy busybodies claiming the sky is falling.
Hens can lay for up to 13 years in my experience. I think they could lay even longer in ideal circumstances. There is no magical 'off' switch that happens when the chook turns two, which is actually supposed to be the start of her true prime, not the end. The only breeds that stop or seriously slow after two years are the really intensive production commercial ones, in my experience, but they too can be kept laying (while freeranging) for years longer.
People entranced by a “misplaced rural nostalgia” are buying chickens from the same hatcheries that supply the nation's largest poultry producers and rearing them without proper space, food or veterinary care, she said.
Backyard chooks are about the only ones who actually get to see a vet. Factory ones get vaccinated, medicated and culled too but basically never get treated like an ailing backyard chook often does, since it's cheaper to replace. Funny how ignorant folks raising them in backyards can have better success rates minus all the 'TLC' the industry offers its inmates. And then there's 'quality of life'. It impacts quality of eggs and meat. Which impacts our quality of health.
“People don’t know what they’re doing,” Britton Clouse said. “And you’ve got this whole culture of people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing teaching every other idiot out there.”
I know people like this woman. Since she knows it all, everyone else who doesn't see it her way is an idiot.
She hopes the enthusiasm for raising backyard chickens will fade and that consumers will take a second look at their appetite for eggs and poultry. “To go back in time sounds wonderful,” she said. “But there is not enough land on this earth to sustain the amount of meat, dairy and milk that people want.”
Funny that she says this while keeping chickens. For no purpose, apparently; not eating the roosters, keeping non laying hens... Surely not breeding them I'd guess. People keep them to feed themselves, and she keeps them for who knows what, and judges those who at least use their animals.
You should see the look on people's face when they learned that My pot belly big gilt will one day be a brood sow for me to raise tasty tasty babies from. Yes I bottle fed her. Yes she is a pet. Her babies won't be, and yes you can eat pot bellies. They ARE pigs. The shelters will not adopt to you if you intend on eating the pigs.
I've met too many dangerous full size pigs to want any, so in future I intend to keep, breed, rear, and consume miniature pigs. I've been looking at Kune Kune and potbelly pigs. Like them both. Some I'd sell for pets since they're a big pet trend over here, but I'd mainly eat them. Kinda doesn't make sense not to, lol. If dog and cat breeders ate the defective ones, we'd have a lot less unwanted animals. Ok, I know that sounds bad... But let's limit that to severely bad genetics and temperaments. Damaged animals make great pets sometimes. But the waste of dog and cat flesh we churn out annually could be feeding the starving people in other countries. Ok, I'm going to shut up now, this is sounding worse and worse, lol! But I mean it in the most sincere way.
Limited gene pool. People tell me off when they ask about her and I recite the good points of a Damara from a commercial or farmer's perspective; they instantly feel sorry for her. But no, she is a pet, and I do spoil her too, just like most pets get spoiled. Having pets doesn't stop me viewing them commercially. My cat is pest control and a pet, my dogs are herders, hunters, stud dogs, and pets, my chooks are meat and egg producing livestock, and pets... Some pets get eaten at the end of their run, is all. Some are special enough to be allowed retirement. 
