DC Heritage Poultry - has anyone used this breeder?

[Chickenosauurs_RexNo54]

Omg I am just finding this thread now… and I’m so sad! DC heritage poultry is only an hour drive from me and I kept thinking how lucky I was that the seemingly biggest rare/heritage chicken breeder in Canada was so close. This thread is making me worry to order my second batch of eggs from them this spring though because I really don’t want to support bad treatment of animals.

I will share my experience though as it has actually been largely positive compared to everyone else’s here, I guess I’ll play devils advocate.

We got 8 hatching eggs last spring and 6 hatched (which I thought was a good number?) I have had zero issues and have 6 wonderful healthy birds with the exception of one hen who has a crooked toe but it otherwise healthy and we love her, her name is Knuckle lol. I am new to chickens so it’s hard to say if they are up to breed standards but they look beautiful to me either way and I have been really happy with them all and no illnesses like everyone else seems to have experienced.

That being said, I just made a post recently in the emergencies section about a 2month old pullet of ours that recently died suddenly. We had gotten two more day old chicks from DC heritage this fall as we loved our chickens from them so much. These two chicks seemed fine and healthy up until a few days ago when one just dropped dead for no apparent reason I found her in the coop on the floor in the morning not roosting with her sister, I picked her up and she was alive but non responsive so I brought her in and we tried to figure out how to help her but she died within a couple of hours. Her sibling seems totally fine still…

So I don’t know, personally I thought it was just a fluke and didn’t cross my mind to blame the breeder and just thought “such is life” kinda thing. But I wonder if there’s a chance that all my other birds are only healthy because I hatched them myself and they didn’t get sick at the breeder? I’m not sure.

Also, I’m so so so sad to hear about the puppy mill… that definitely does not instill confidence in their ability to care for animals I do believe people can change but this doesn’t seem that likely if they jumped right back into large scale animal breeding and chose an animal that has way lower ethical standards than dogs.

But again, devils advocate lol, Im wondering if there is ANY chance it is not the same people though?! Maybe I am just in denial lol
But I’m confused because the puppy mill lady has a different name (Nicole) than who I have been dealing with (Danielle) and also looks quite different to me… I have been to the farm twice now and met Danielle who seemed very nice but obviously that doesn’t mean that she isn’t hiding anything. But yeah, she really didn’t look like the picture in the article to me, granted that picture is 10yrs old so maybe I didn’t recognize her.

Can anyone here confirm that it’s the same people running the place? Also has anyone here seen the conditions the chickens live in? While I was there I didn’t see any of their chickens so I can’t speak to that but would love to know.

Sigh… I really wanted these guys to be good

I guess the only way to get healthy chicks is to get hatching eggs from them. I was skeptical of buying chicks from them, but the hatching eggs sound like a much better alternative.

 

[Happyfeet2020]

It’s so crazy to me that so many people have had the exact same experience with this seller and they are still selling?!?! In 2021 we bought 9 chickens from her and all have died. She pretended that she didn’t really know why they all had a respiratory disease but after reading all these comments it obvious she is knowingly selling sick birds. Not only did I have to watch them all die after trying to help them, they infected my whole flock. I like to believe in karma for people like this who willingly make animals and people suffer. Shame on her.

 

[FarmingforYears]

DO NOT use this breeder. We made the mistake of several orders from there. Many of their breeds were clearly inbred, and failed to thrive. I have 2 year old cream legbar roosters that are only slightly larger than seramas. Very low hatch rate as well. Afterwards, I learned that the owners also ran a puppy mill until it was shut down. They were able to do this due to the lack of animal cruelty laws. The information I have is from research, personal experience, and from American Poultry Association ACE program examiners and judges.

AGREED!! Ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to their attention, they emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill!

 

[FarmingforYears]

I was wondering if anyone has ever used this breeder for their chickens? I've never heard of this place before,but I want to give them a try because they have the breeds I want and they can fly the chicks to my local airport or possible mail them via Canada Post - which is great because it means I wont have to order from the states (I'm in Canada), drive an hour or two down to some place in Maine I've never been to, then drive back, get through the border and hope that I don't kill any chicks in the process.

The thing is I would like to hear from some people who have used this breeder, I want to know if there have been any issues, either with chick health, customer service, etc. I'm not looking to show or anything fancy, I just want healthy chickens that I can feed to my family and friends, even if it means that I have to go through all the steps listed above.

Unscrupulous! Ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to their attention, they emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill!

 

[FarmingforYears]

It’s so crazy to me that so many people have had the exact same experience with this seller and they are still selling?!?! In 2021 we bought 9 chickens from her and all have died. She pretended that she didn’t really know why they all had a respiratory disease but after reading all these comments it obvious she is knowingly selling sick birds. Not only did I have to watch them all die after trying to help them, they infected my whole flock. I like to believe in karma for people like this who willingly make animals and people suffer. Shame on her.

AGREED!! Unscrupulous and practicing animal cruelty based on so many sick chicken posts. For me, I ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to their attention, they emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill! Anyone having this experience should also report them to the Quebec Government site for ensuring animal safety and welfare. quebec.ca/en/agriculture-environment-and-natural-resources/animal-health/ensuring-animal-safety-welfare
There is an online form for reports or you can call 1-844-264-6289

 

[FarmingforYears]

I guess the only way to get healthy chicks is to get hatching eggs from them. I was skeptical of buying chicks from them, but the hatching eggs sound like a much better alternative.

DO NOT order from DC Heritage Poultry!! Believe the negative reviews! Unscrupulous and practicing animal cruelty based on so many sick chicken posts. For me, I ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to their attention, they emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill! Anyone having this experience should also report them to the Quebec Government site for ensuring animal safety and welfare. quebec.ca/en/agriculture-environment-and-natural-resources/animal-health/ensuring-animal-safety-welfare
There is an online form for reports or you can call 1-844-264-6289

 

[FarmingforYears]

Buyer beware with DC heritage poultry. This is my first year raising a laying flock and I thought it would be so fun to have a colourful egg basket and decided to look into heritage birds. I didn't want chicks shipped in the mail as i've always heard horror stories and also didn't want to drive a long distance to pick them up. I was happy when I discovered DC heritage poultry, they were only 45 minutes from my home and had a large selection of heritage birds to chose from at good prices. It never crossed my mind to check reviews or do some digging into this company, their website looked good and they were very professional when communicating my email. I placed an order for spring of this year 2021 and put down a deposit. When it came time to go pick up the chicks I paid the rest of my invoice as instructed and we communicated a little by email as some of the breeds I had requested didn't have full hatch rates and they suggested either refunding me or giving me a different breed of chick that had better hatch rates. I chose to take more lavender orpington birds rather than take a refund. When I arrived to pick them up I had a bad feeling as there wasn't much to the property, it just seemed like a run down old farm and not like a five star breeding facility like they claimed on their website. I picked up the chicks and went home, I thought everything was going well as I hadn't lost a single chick during the brooding process when they are their most fragile. A month and a half in I lost a girl, she seemed like she had hurt a leg and I assumed one of the other chicks had steeped on her in some way. I put her in isolation to rest up as everything else about her seemed fine, she was dead in the morning. A few weeks later the same thing happened and a few weeks after that another dead chick that seemed fine one day and the next was quite weak and died fairly quickly with no other signs of illness. My first thought was that with the weakness and leg issues was that for some reason the chickens had a riboflavin deficiency so I gave them all some beef liver to get their vitamins in as I'd read Joel Salatin had done once.

Then our only black copper maran from the bunch started to seem ill, she had her tail down and wouldn't run around the yard like her usual self poking around for bugs and scratching in the dirt. Again she seemed weak like the others and we were keeping a close eye on her, she also started to breathe with a gapping beak which we were very concerned about. The others hadn't done this. We started researching diseases and ways we could doctor our sick bird. I had a gut feeling something wasn't right and emailed the breeder to ask if they could have possibly sent me home with sick birds as I had never had issues like this in the past with my previous flock of egg layers given to me by a neighbour or any of our batches of meat birds. Danielle found a reason to blame me as I had possibly switched them from starter to lay ration too soon and I blamed myself for their deaths. The sick black copper maran was found one afternoon sitting under the ramp into the coop barely able to move, I got her out and again put a chicken into isolation. I tried adding nutri drench to her water to get extra vitamins into her to hopefully give her a boost and called started looking for a vet to help. The only vet in our area was too busy to come and she finally died as well. This was in September and we've had two more die since then. I finally had the thought to look for reviews of the breeder DC heritage poultry and found this thread, it gives me relief knowing its not something we did on our farm to make these chickens sick but is also shocking knowing this company has so little remorse for the problems they've inflicted on chicken keepers who only want the best for their flocks. A company that was once canada's largest puppy mill suddenly doesn't become reputable and start a chicken breeding program that sells high quality chicks\chickens.

I am going to contact Danielle and see about getting a refund as of the 20 chicks I originally purchased I have 6 remaining and i'm not even sure they'll make it considering everything. We've even tried a round of antibiotics used to treat respiratory disease in chickens and have still had more die. At this point I don't know what else to do to save them.

DO NOT order from DC Heritage Poultry!! Believe the negative reviews! Unscrupulous and practicing animal cruelty based on so many sick chicken posts. For me, I ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to Danielle's attention, she emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill! Anyone having this experience should also report them to the Quebec Government site for ensuring animal safety and welfare. quebec.ca/en/agriculture-environment-and-natural-resources/animal-health/ensuring-animal-safety-welfare
There is an online form for reports or you can call 1-844-264-6289

 

[FarmingforYears]

Buyer beware with DC heritage poultry. This is my first year raising a laying flock and I thought it would be so fun to have a colourful egg basket and decided to look into heritage birds. I didn't want chicks shipped in the mail as i've always heard horror stories and also didn't want to drive a long distance to pick them up. I was happy when I discovered DC heritage poultry, they were only 45 minutes from my home and had a large selection of heritage birds to chose from at good prices. It never crossed my mind to check reviews or do some digging into this company, their website looked good and they were very professional when communicating my email. I placed an order for spring of this year 2021 and put down a deposit. When it came time to go pick up the chicks I paid the rest of my invoice as instructed and we communicated a little by email as some of the breeds I had requested didn't have full hatch rates and they suggested either refunding me or giving me a different breed of chick that had better hatch rates. I chose to take more lavender orpington birds rather than take a refund. When I arrived to pick them up I had a bad feeling as there wasn't much to the property, it just seemed like a run down old farm and not like a five star breeding facility like they claimed on their website. I picked up the chicks and went home, I thought everything was going well as I hadn't lost a single chick during the brooding process when they are their most fragile. A month and a half in I lost a girl, she seemed like she had hurt a leg and I assumed one of the other chicks had steeped on her in some way. I put her in isolation to rest up as everything else about her seemed fine, she was dead in the morning. A few weeks later the same thing happened and a few weeks after that another dead chick that seemed fine one day and the next was quite weak and died fairly quickly with no other signs of illness. My first thought was that with the weakness and leg issues was that for some reason the chickens had a riboflavin deficiency so I gave them all some beef liver to get their vitamins in as I'd read Joel Salatin had done once.

Then our only black copper maran from the bunch started to seem ill, she had her tail down and wouldn't run around the yard like her usual self poking around for bugs and scratching in the dirt. Again she seemed weak like the others and we were keeping a close eye on her, she also started to breathe with a gapping beak which we were very concerned about. The others hadn't done this. We started researching diseases and ways we could doctor our sick bird. I had a gut feeling something wasn't right and emailed the breeder to ask if they could have possibly sent me home with sick birds as I had never had issues like this in the past with my previous flock of egg layers given to me by a neighbour or any of our batches of meat birds. Danielle found a reason to blame me as I had possibly switched them from starter to lay ration too soon and I blamed myself for their deaths. The sick black copper maran was found one afternoon sitting under the ramp into the coop barely able to move, I got her out and again put a chicken into isolation. I tried adding nutri drench to her water to get extra vitamins into her to hopefully give her a boost and called started looking for a vet to help. The only vet in our area was too busy to come and she finally died as well. This was in September and we've had two more die since then. I finally had the thought to look for reviews of the breeder DC heritage poultry and found this thread, it gives me relief knowing its not something we did on our farm to make these chickens sick but is also shocking knowing this company has so little remorse for the problems they've inflicted on chicken keepers who only want the best for their flocks. A company that was once canada's largest puppy mill suddenly doesn't become reputable and start a chicken breeding program that sells high quality chicks\chickens.

I am going to contact Danielle and see about getting a refund as of the 20 chicks I originally purchased I have 6 remaining and i'm not even sure they'll make it considering everything. We've even tried a round of antibiotics used to treat respiratory disease in chickens and have still had more die. At this point I don't know what else to do to save them.

DO NOT order from DC Heritage Poultry!! Believe the negative reviews! Unscrupulous and practicing animal cruelty based on so many sick chicken posts. For me, I ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to their attention, they emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill! Anyone having this experience should also report them to the Quebec Government site for ensuring animal safety and welfare. quebec.ca/en/agriculture-environment-and-natural-resources/animal-health/ensuring-animal-safety-welfare
There is an online form for reports or you can call 1-844-264-6289

 

[FarmingforYears]

Omg I am just finding this thread now… and I’m so sad! DC heritage poultry is only an hour drive from me and I kept thinking how lucky I was that the seemingly biggest rare/heritage chicken breeder in Canada was so close. This thread is making me worry to order my second batch of eggs from them this spring though because I really don’t want to support bad treatment of animals.

I will share my experience though as it has actually been largely positive compared to everyone else’s here, I guess I’ll play devils advocate.

We got 8 hatching eggs last spring and 6 hatched (which I thought was a good number?) I have had zero issues and have 6 wonderful healthy birds with the exception of one hen who has a crooked toe but it otherwise healthy and we love her, her name is Knuckle lol. I am new to chickens so it’s hard to say if they are up to breed standards but they look beautiful to me either way and I have been really happy with them all and no illnesses like everyone else seems to have experienced.

That being said, I just made a post recently in the emergencies section about a 2month old pullet of ours that recently died suddenly. We had gotten two more day old chicks from DC heritage this fall as we loved our chickens from them so much. These two chicks seemed fine and healthy up until a few days ago when one just dropped dead for no apparent reason I found her in the coop on the floor in the morning not roosting with her sister, I picked her up and she was alive but non responsive so I brought her in and we tried to figure out how to help her but she died within a couple of hours. Her sibling seems totally fine still…

So I don’t know, personally I thought it was just a fluke and didn’t cross my mind to blame the breeder and just thought “such is life” kinda thing. But I wonder if there’s a chance that all my other birds are only healthy because I hatched them myself and they didn’t get sick at the breeder? I’m not sure.

Also, I’m so so so sad to hear about the puppy mill… that definitely does not instill confidence in their ability to care for animals I do believe people can change but this doesn’t seem that likely if they jumped right back into large scale animal breeding and chose an animal that has way lower ethical standards than dogs.

But again, devils advocate lol, Im wondering if there is ANY chance it is not the same people though?! Maybe I am just in denial lol
But I’m confused because the puppy mill lady has a different name (Nicole) than who I have been dealing with (Danielle) and also looks quite different to me… I have been to the farm twice now and met Danielle who seemed very nice but obviously that doesn’t mean that she isn’t hiding anything. But yeah, she really didn’t look like the picture in the article to me, granted that picture is 10yrs old so maybe I didn’t recognize her.

Can anyone here confirm that it’s the same people running the place? Also has anyone here seen the conditions the chickens live in? While I was there I didn’t see any of their chickens so I can’t speak to that but would love to know.

Sigh… I really wanted these guys to be good

DO NOT order from DC Heritage Poultry!! Believe the negative reviews! Unscrupulous and practicing animal cruelty based on so many sick chicken posts. For me, I ordered 24 Fertilized Jubilee Orpington eggs - ZERO fertility rate - then when I brought this to their attention, they emailed and admitted to using an old rooster with a low fertility rate. ZERO! They replaced eggs with only 16 Jubilee, 2 lavender and 6 chocolate laced Orpington eggs - 20 were unfertilized again and 3 were clearly NOT Orpingtons at all, 2 may be Legbar, 1 is unknown, they admitted putting random egg in by mistake and the other chick, who knows what it is. $12 an egg. Plus knowing they sent unfertilized eggs, they still charged me an additional $72 for shipping. Looks like they switched from a puppy mill to a chicken mill! Anyone having this experience should also report them to the Quebec Government site for ensuring animal safety and welfare. quebec.ca/en/agriculture-environment-and-natural-resources/animal-health/ensuring-animal-safety-welfare
There is an online form for reports or you can call 1-844-264-6289

 

[Meldup]

I really wish I had seen this tread before. I wanted to move away from hatchery eggs and some of the breeds lay eggs religiously for 2 years and then die. I had my beautiful silkies, who were horrible layers but I have some that are 6-7 year old and still going strong. I did not want the chickens as mass egg producers. I wanted sweet beautiful pets that could bless me with a few eggs a day and live their life out safe and healthy.
I wanted to be more variety to my flock, and saw DC Heritage has a few birds, hens, of different breeds. I read about each breed and decided on 6 I wanted and paid fairly but way more than hatchery birds and she talked me into two others that I fell in love with and couldn’t refuse.
I chose DC HEritage also because they said they vaccinated against Mercks that was introduced t my flock by another breeder; so I wanted to ensure that any additions would not be affected. When she went in to retrieve the birds my son and I weren’t allowed inside due to insecurity, and I expected that. I even washed my shoes in Javex before I went in case I did have to walk into their ban. I didn’t want to chance avian flu or Merck infection. The biosecurity signs and not being allowed in impressed me.
Out of the 8, I have ached 4 waste away. I have brought them to vets, rounds of antibiotics, amprol, vitamins, changed the food. Had fecal and blood tests done and nothing. 2 months later I am down to 4 of the 8 and it aches my heart that this is happening. Desperately nursing them back to no avail. It is not about money but that it seems these birds are so inbred that they aren’t viable. They were all born between Dec-Feb, all unique and loved.