Thanks acre4me, that isnt too far from me, and I had never heard of it. The next auction is a couple weeks away so that will be a good backup option. I have a question about this. What is the crate situation for the auction? Do i supply a crate? Is that included with the sale? Ive never been to one of these.
We fashioned “crates” from cardboard boxes and chicken wire with zip ties to connect the two. We used packing tape to reinforce the cardboard where we poked holes for the zip ties. So the chickens could be seen better, we cut off two sides of the cardboard box so the bottom and two sides were still there, but the rest was chicken wire, or in the case of short boxes, we did mostly chicken wire. I bought a 4'x50' pack of chicken wire for approx $20, figured I would have more chickens to sell at some point in the future.
Some people just had their animals in cardboard boxes with the type and age written in sharpie on the outside (OK in January - not recommended in hot July!). Some had nice cages that were not sold. Some cages were auctioned off separately from the animal. The majority of animals were removed from the cages and shown to the bidders, with first winner getting choice, etc. However, everything from one seller was auctioned off at the same block time, so its not like one sellers items were lumped in with another's. Ours were not removed from the cages since the cages came with. Animals were lined up, in the open for anyone to look at, and for bidders to see what they might like to bid on, prior to the auction start. For this reason, I was hoping that open cages would entice bids. In the end sell price was approx $7/bird before commission, and all our birds sold. It was my first auction as well. I'm glad I wasn't bidding as I'm not sure I would have known exactly what price things were going for...the auctioneer has a special language LOL. We received cash and a receipt afterwards.
Ours were sold with the animal, but we told them that cage went with the animal. We did it that way because my child had to go to a sporting competition event at a certain time, and we would not have been able to stay after a certain time and were not sure at what point we could get a cage back, and didn't have a good cage we wanted to sell. These are a couple of our cages: I also added a tag on each one indicating breed, age and hatch date, gender, and hatchery source of the chick (they are the white tags on the cages).
Good Luck! Hopefully you can get some feed money!
