Now, back to chickens.
When I first got my girls, all the country folk up here were loaded with free advice about how to raise them, etc. "Why, when I was a young'n my dad had the biggest chicken farm in the area!" OR "You have 7 chickens? haw, haw, haw. What's anybody gonna do with 7 measly chickens? I had me 3000!" <me: ??????????>
As time went on, they'd say, "I ain't never heard of no fancy colored chickens like that. I thought all chickens were white, like ours!"
Or, "What's moulting? Our chickens never done that!"
Or, "Are my eggs organic? Well, these here are yard eggs."
Or, "You've gotta burn their beaks so they won't eat each other!"
After scratching my head for awhile, and after hanging out here at BYC and learning a little bit about the topic, I finally figured out that most of these folks had only raised meaties in those huge commercial chicken factories and knew NOTHING about laying hens. A few of the others had "yard chickens" (is that similar to a yard/jail bird?) Shoulda seen me trying to sort all this out.
They were trying to apply their mass production rules to my backyard hobby and vice versa. No wonder the folks at the feed stores looked at me like I was nuts for wanting 1-2 bags of organic feed. Guess that's also why everyone insisted I needed a rooster for eggs. They needed some boys so they could maintain the inventory and generalized it to getting ANY eggs at all. So, now, *I'm* educating *them* about chickens!! What a hoot!
When I first got my girls, all the country folk up here were loaded with free advice about how to raise them, etc. "Why, when I was a young'n my dad had the biggest chicken farm in the area!" OR "You have 7 chickens? haw, haw, haw. What's anybody gonna do with 7 measly chickens? I had me 3000!" <me: ??????????>
As time went on, they'd say, "I ain't never heard of no fancy colored chickens like that. I thought all chickens were white, like ours!"
Or, "What's moulting? Our chickens never done that!"
Or, "Are my eggs organic? Well, these here are yard eggs."
Or, "You've gotta burn their beaks so they won't eat each other!"
After scratching my head for awhile, and after hanging out here at BYC and learning a little bit about the topic, I finally figured out that most of these folks had only raised meaties in those huge commercial chicken factories and knew NOTHING about laying hens. A few of the others had "yard chickens" (is that similar to a yard/jail bird?) Shoulda seen me trying to sort all this out.
They were trying to apply their mass production rules to my backyard hobby and vice versa. No wonder the folks at the feed stores looked at me like I was nuts for wanting 1-2 bags of organic feed. Guess that's also why everyone insisted I needed a rooster for eggs. They needed some boys so they could maintain the inventory and generalized it to getting ANY eggs at all. So, now, *I'm* educating *them* about chickens!! What a hoot!