Thank you for the in-depth reply,
I have checked the city ordinances and we're in such a rural area they allow everything from mules to cattle to bees with no restrictions other than not to be loud and to keep them fenced in. I'm good on that front.. and also, I'll definitely have the coops built before any purchases are made. I just like planning and getting all of my bases covered beforehand. I don't like the idea of getting a coop built and THEN just starting to look around for chicks.. but, I also won't be eating these birds.. they'll be pampered from most peoples perspectives and live LONG lives without being on the dinner table which is why I was wanting to purchase from the best bloodlines from the get go.. I'll still look into different hatcheries, I've heard cackles was the best, but I'm REALLY wanting the best chicks..
Are you speaking from a money saving standpoint or saying I might not be able to take care of them vs. hatchery raised chicks? I figured the better bred birds would be easier to take care of and more hardy leading to less disease and problems?
If you have not kept chickens before, then it is usually advised to start with hatchery stock to save money. First time chicken keepers tend to inadvertently kill their chickens because of their inexperience in knowing how to care for chickens - which means you will waste money if you buy the best bird you can find and then have a lot of deaths the first year or so of chicken keeping.
Your comments on pampering your chickens concerns me. I've seen too many times that the pampered chickens are generally the chickens that are not hardy, they become sick and injured quite easily because they were treated like human babies rather than what they are - chickens. This website is full of people who pamper their chickens. And it is also full of people who literally love their chickens to death by making them unable to acclimate and tolerate a variety of temperatures, weather, and living situations. They wind up breeding sickly chickens because they love them so much and are unable to face the realities of chicken keeping and making hard decisions. They run to the feed store and buy antibiotics for their chickens because their chicken doesn't want to eat and they think that antibiotics will magically cure their favorite hen.
These are not dogs and cats. You have to do different things with chickens to keep them healthy, compared to what you would do with your dog. There is a difference between treating your chickens well so that they thrive, and pampering them so much that you enable them to become unable to adapt to minor stressors that cause them to do poorly.
I'm curious as to how you are planning on breeding your birds and why you think you need the best chickens if you do not plan on eating your birds and you plan on pampering them and keeping them for ever. This really is incongruous and makes me think that you have been reading the romanticized chicken keeping articles in magazines and you don't have a real handle on what it is to raise chickens - particularly in a farming/homesteading situation. And if you aren't looking to seriously breed for some sort of production or to the SOP, then some hatchery layers will likely suit you just fine. Otherwise, there are some things you may need to think about, because your post sent up some big red flags to me.
How are you going to breed chickens to keep your flock perpetuated - and perpetuated only by the birds with the best characteristics, while having enough space and money to feed and house chickens over the years as they multiply?
What are you going to do with the hens that stop laying?
What are you going to do with all the roosters that you hatch over the years?
Each hatch is usually about a 50/50 split of males and females, and that is a whole lot of roosters you're going to have around if you aren't planning on eating them.
Are you going to be able to sell or give birds to someone else, knowing that they most likely will be someone's dinner?
Do you have any idea of how many people out there don't want to eat Mr. Roo, but they don't want anyone else to eat him either?
There are not enough *good homes* for cats and dogs, and there are a lot more unwanted roosters out there that are not going to be able to find a *good home* than there are cats and dogs dying at the pound every day.
Do you understand what happens when you have too many roosters?
Do you understand that when you put too many roosters into a flock that you can have a lot of cock fights occur and they may even fight to the death or so seriously injure each other that they die or need to be euthanized?
Chickens are attracted to new and different things in their environment. And like a baby that sticks things in its mouth to learn about things, chickens peck at things they are trying to learn about. So they peck a spot of blood on another chicken. And then another chicken pecks at the blood spot. And that causes someone's comb to bleed. And so they peck more at the blood. Until they wind up pecking the chicken to death. They don't mean to do it, but it happens.
We had that happen in one of our pens during the first year of chicken keeping. It took just a couple of hours from the time I had last seen them, until I went back out and found they had pecked all the flesh off the chicken's head, exposed the bone, and had a hole started into the skull itself. We had to kill that chicken immediately. It was suffering and euthanizing it was the right thing to do.
What if that happens to you - can you euthanize that bird to keep it from suffering? What if your birds get attacked and seriously injured by a predator? If need be, can you euthanize that bird to keep it from suffering any longer after a dog has taken a few chomps out of it?
And if you want the *best* birds that you can find, I am assuming that you are wanting to breed them for the best traits. Which means you will have to hatch a LOT of birds over the years in order to have a good selection of birds to choose the best traits from for continued breeding. What are you going to do with all the birds that don't make the cut for being breeders?
I have seen what happens when people with idealistic, romantic dreams of having farm chickens wind up in trouble because they want to have their *ladies* and their *roos*, and keep them as if they were royalty and wait on them hand and foot, and refuse to eat their chickens or allow anyone else to eat their chickens either. It isn't pretty. And it's the chickens that suffer - they wind up with cramped living quarters, sickly sometimes because it is too cramped. When room runs out in the pampered pen, those pampered chickens are let loose to free range - but they don't know how to alert to a predator because they have always been safe in their chicken mansions and they wind up being killed, and sometimes tortured by the predator for fun. Hens wind up with torn up and bleeding backs and combs from too many roosters trying to mate them. Sanitation in the chicken area often goes down because there are too many to reasonably care for.
While I understand where you are at in your thinking - I also know the reality of things and right now, I would recommend that you do a lot more learning and thinking about some of these things before you even continue to consider getting chickens.
There is a reason that so many chicks, ducks, and rabbits are abandoned at the pound every year after Easter - because these animals have different needs and people think they are cute but are not ready for the reality of keeping them.
With the backyard chicken craze - everybody wants a chicken that makes them breakfast, but they wind up with a lot of heartache when they are unprepared for what to do when their hen turns out to be a *roo*, or when they have too many *roos* or just plain to many chickens. After a few years when their original hens stop laying, they want more hens, so they can have eggs, but they don't have the room because they refuse to allow the old hens to be butchered. So they think that somebody will want them, maybe if they just dump the old hens at a rescue group or the animal shelter, then they can get new hens - they think that there is going to be a home waiting for their unwanted birds, a home that will put a diaper on their birds and watch tv with them....that's not the case. A couple of weeks ago I had someone unhappy that no one wanted their *roo* - and of course they didn't want the bird to be eaten. When I told them that they should have had a plan in place before they got chickens, they said that their plan was that the roosters would go to live with their parents and a friend. Problem was, they had just kept on getting/hatching chickens without thinking and now their family and friends' homes were full and they couldn't take any more roosters. So the person was stuck with a rooster they couldn't have where they lived, and nowhere to take it since they were opposed to allowing someone else to kill and eat the bird. Not a very good plan to count on someone else to take the chickens you don't want or can no longer keep if you are opposed to other people eating the birds you raised.
If you can't euthanize your chickens when you need to, then you need to have a plan to have an avian vet willing to see chickens when you have a problem - BEFORE you have a problem. An emergency is not the time to be searching for help.
If you can't butcher your own chickens, then you need to be willing to sell your chickens to someone, even if they are going to eat the birds - otherwise you will end up with too many birds and wind up very unhappy. Not to mention the potential for a lot of distressed birds.
Right now, the plan you have for your chickens is not sustainable for very long.
