Ugh, that sounds like a horrible time I'm so sorry you had to deal with that. Also how freaking rude of them to rub it in your face like that! Sheesh, doesn't anyone know manners anymore?I feel you! My geese are my babies too.
I don’t judge other people who raise their livestock for food purposes, I’m not naive to the real world and people’s livelihoods, but my goose babies are mine and I can choose who they go to if at all.
As it is I’ve only ever given away two goslings that turned out to be a bad expierience. They didn’t specify what would become of them but they live in the same town and every time I bumped into them after that they made a point to tell me that they were going to eat them. Like I said other people’s birds are their business so long as they aren’t abused, but constantly choosing to rub it in like that was a shitty thing to do. They wouldn’t give them back either, I guess they just wanted to taunt me. I’ve always worried about those two little ones and what their lives were like with people like that.
Never doing that again.
You can also pre-screen buyers prior to breeding season, limit the number of your hatchlings by monitoring the eggs and only incubating the number of eggs/hatchlings you want.
I've come to the realization that there's not gonna be a way around me not having to hard-cull (aka eat) some of my geese that just don't make the cut for my breeding project. I'm personally okay with that, and I'm also okay with selling them to people with the intention of being raised for food.
I'll make sure to preface to people that "Hey, this is a very rare, critically endangered, heritage breed goose. It's fine if you want to raise them for meat, but I would highly suggest you breed them out first if you want to do that just to get the numbers up."
But once that gosling/goose leaves my farm, it's not my circus or monkeys anymore. Unless obviously, I find out that poor thing is being abused, then it is most certainly my circus and monkeys and I'm grabbing the lion tamer's whip.
So, incubation question. What's everyone using for their incubators and how is everyone doing with hatching them out themselves? Because I've had a hell of a time trying to get any babies at all. I was told by a friend that's hatched out geese before that the best way to go is to use a cabinet incubator. I've currently got a Brinsea Octagon 20 Eco (IIRC, it's been a hot minute since I've pulled that thing down and used it). It hatches chicks out for me no problem but when I tried geese it... didn't go well. I tried to keep up on the humidity protocols but I'm just not sure if there's a trick to it or not?