This is my first attempt at raising meat birds and they arrived on Wednesday this week. I’ve been raising layers for about 4 years and felt competent enough to at least get this batch of 15 rainbow rangers to slaughter age. I have a mama heating pad setup that I’ve used many times before without problems. It is a piece of hardware cloth with a heating pad with cover wrapped around it and secured with duct tape. I wrap a cloth around that so it can be removed and washed from time to time. They can go inside the heating pad cave or sit on top. This group of chicks seemed to like getting inside the cloth and under the folds.
This morning we found 7 chicks dead in the brooder. It appears that they were stuck inside the cloth I have covering the heating pad and suffocated or overheated. Not really sure.
The remaining 8 chicks seem strong, healthy and unaffected. I removed the cloth from the heating pad and will just spot clean it from here on out. I used a heat lamp in the beginning of chicken keeping and this morning wish that I kept with that method. Maybe this was too many chicks for my setup??? I had one other batch of 15 chicks (layers) and didn’t have this problem.
Anyway, I’m thinking of all the ways this could have been avoided and feeling very irresponsible.
Just needed to get that out. Thanks for reading this.
This morning we found 7 chicks dead in the brooder. It appears that they were stuck inside the cloth I have covering the heating pad and suffocated or overheated. Not really sure.
The remaining 8 chicks seem strong, healthy and unaffected. I removed the cloth from the heating pad and will just spot clean it from here on out. I used a heat lamp in the beginning of chicken keeping and this morning wish that I kept with that method. Maybe this was too many chicks for my setup??? I had one other batch of 15 chicks (layers) and didn’t have this problem.
Anyway, I’m thinking of all the ways this could have been avoided and feeling very irresponsible.
Just needed to get that out. Thanks for reading this.
