chickens breaking loose!

[ChickenMommy]

My Easter Eggers are getting loose. They jump up on the fence and out and don't jump back in. They will come stay by the fence and fuss when it starts to get dark. My RIRs never jump over the fence. I have decided I need to clip the Easter Eggers as we have LOTS of roaming neighboorhood dogs that would love to get my EE chickens.
Has anyone clipped their chicken? How do you do it safely?

 

[chickengirlnm]

I had the same problem with two little banty chicks, my roo would always fly up into the tree, on the roof of our house or he and his girlfriend would jump the fence and be out in the front yard where any of the neighborhood dogs/cats could get them.
What we did was wait till it got near bed time I picked them up and brought them in the house placed them under my arm like a football and opened thier wing and just cut the first 10 or so feathers I clipped them back pretty short and only did one wing per bird to throw them off balance - than after we put them to bed and in the morning problem solved they have been staying in thier yard and out of trouble.
Good luck with your EE's - for bigger chickens it might help to have an extra pair of hands to hold or do the cutting.

Julie

 

[firem3]

byc has all the info you need. go to the home page, then to learning center, on to misc. section, wing clipping is a subject that is covered very well.

 

[ChickenMommy]

How did you cut them? Was it hard? How far down do you cut the wings?

 

[chickengirlnm]

It was not hard at all - the feathers cut very easy the hardest part was getting them to sit still at first !!
I cut the first 10 feathers starting from the tip and I cut them about half way just be careful not to go to far or they will bleed I used a small pair of scissors ( sp?) that way it was easy to handle both the wing and the scissors at the same time.
you might be able to wrap a towel around the chicken to help them from moving around , since I was cutting the feathers of my banty's I did not have to wrap them up.
somewhere on BYC there is a thread about cutting that has a great picture of the wing and how far you need to cut and how many feathers to cut it really helped me with mine.

Julie