Chicken lifespan

[Percydoodle]

I’m having a hard morning. Six years ago (like many other people!) we got 5 cute little chicks. We’ve absolutely adored them and since getting them moved to a bigger property and got more chickens. But those guys were our ‘og’ chickens and held an extra special place. They were buff Orpingtons. Maybe two years in we lost one very suddenly while we were away for the weekend. Our pet sitter found her dead. Shortly after moving to our new place we lost one to a bobcat. We learned our lesson on leaving them out too late in the evening and that hasn’t been an issue again. So we had the three og girls going into this winter. One had been looking not great this summer, getting skinny and a bit puffed up. No parasites. She passed away last month and we were sad but accept that they don’t live forever and the other two were still very healthy. Since then, one of them we noticed has a growth on her vent. It’s not poop, we’ve washed it all clean and it feels like tissue and breaks off like chicken meat. She has a vet appointment Monday to be looked at. However, our most favorite of the original group has suddenly gone downhill. She’s had a small occasional sneeze since last summer that didn’t seem to progress so we weren’t concerned. Over the last week she really deteriorated though. I’m not sure she will make it through the weekend, we can’t get her in anywhere because both avian vets are off today. I’m just feeling like I’ve let them down. I see so many people say their chickens lived to 10+ but now all of my old girls are not even going to make it to six years old. Am I seeing survivor bias when people talking about their old chickens? Do most not really live that long?

 

[BlindLemonChicken]

Most chickens do not make it to ten. I have seen quite a few make it to eight but that isn’t the norm either. I would say five is pretty good! It really depends on too many factors to say that any one chicken keeping factor contributes to longer-lived chickens. My mom, for instance, has several eight-year-old chickens. Her coop has almost no ventilation and I’ve known her to feed her chickens straight scratch instead of layer or all-flock feed. She does all kinds of things I would consider poor chicken-keeping wisdom and yet half her flock is geriatric.

I wouldn’t beat yourself up about this. Your chickens have had a good life and they were loved!

 

[Mrs. K]

I agree with BlindLemonChicken. I have had a few chickens make five or six, never seven years. And to be honest, the six year olds were often crabby. If you get a lively 10 year old bird, that is a gift, but not common. Many of my birds die of natural causes around 3.5-4 years of age. Just ordinary hatchery stock.

Think about people and even with modern medicine, people die at all different ages.

I always hesitate to open these kinds of threads as people seem to feel guilty of things that are entirely out of their control.

Did you give them a good life? That part is under your control and your responsibility. If you neglected them, did not keep clean water, no food well then that is poor husbandry. You can feel guilty of that.

But the length of life of any living organism is not ours to control. Enjoy the birds you have, be grateful for the start they gave you in this wonderful hobby, and accept there death as a life well lived.

 

[SamLockwood]

They're not particularly long-lived animals even under ideal condtions. I had a hen that was over 10 years old and was pretty feisty until the last month she was alive, and I've got one old biddy that's at least seven years old and still laying eggs and keepign up with the youngsters. But those are rare.

On the other hand, I've had one enormous cockerel that developed heart problems because of it and had to be culled. I had one hen less than a year old get egg-bound, seemed to recover, then died of a heart attack a week later. One of my guinea hens, about a year old, I was treating for bumblefoot and during a thunderstorm died of a heart attack. At two years old I had a guinea get heat-stroke, I picked him up to take him inside to cool off and he had some sort of siezure and died in my arms as I was opening the door. One of my sweetest hens died of a heart attack at two and a half years old, and one from the same hatching died a few weeks later from, I think, a fall from getting knocked off her roost (I found her sprawled on the coop floor one morning).

It's one of the reasons I try not to get too attached. It's why they evolved a breeding strategy that's just "let's have tons and tons of babies as soon as possible." If I let my flock breed all the eggs they wanted to, I'd likely have over a thousand chickens by now. As it is, in three years I've probably hatched something like 200 and kept a couple dozen for myself.