Help me feel better please 🙏🏼

[Chicalina]

I've been keeping chickens as pets for many many years, and hatching chicks to renew my little flock and rehoming roosters and any flock members that don't fit in.

This year I had an excess of roosters (not unexpected when you hatch chicks) and I couldn't find homes for them. They were SO noisy and my neighbours were getting really annoyed. It really was an unreasonable level of daily din. I culled them and now I can't stop thinking about it and how it feels wrong to take a healthy life, especially one that you created.

I eat meat but I don't raise my chickens as food. Their bodies were disposed of.

I know in my head that it was the best thing for my flock, for me and for harmony with my neighbours. So why am I racked with guilt and keep reliving the act and feel absolutely terrible and the worst person ever?

I know y'all will understand. Please help me come to terms with it.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

I've been keeping chickens as pets for many many years, and hatching chicks to renew my little flock and rehoming roosters and any flock members that don't fit in.

This year I had an excess of roosters (not unexpected when you hatch chicks) and I couldn't find homes for them. They were SO noisy and my neighbours were getting really annoyed. It really was an unreasonable level of daily din. I culled them and now I can't stop thinking about it and how it feels wrong to take a healthy life, especially one that you created.

I eat meat but I don't raise my chickens as food. Their bodies were disposed of.

I know in my head that it was the best thing for my flock, for me and for harmony with my neighbours. So why am I racked with guilt and keep reliving the act and feel absolutely terrible and the worst person ever?

I know y'all will understand. Please help me come to terms with it.

The best I’ve got is to compare the life you gave them to that which they’d have had in a different setting - killed as soon as they were identified as male, raised in a production facility, etc.

All life comes to an end. Chickens, compared to many medium to large sized animals, tend to have short lives, dying in a predator attack, a disease, trauma inflicted by other chickens, or plain old age.

I think this: chickens lovingly raised have a great life and one bad day. That’s a lot better than most have.

(I’m tenderhearted as well, and to this day get weepy when hearing “Memories”, Grizabella’s song in “Cats.”)

 

[thecatumbrella]

This year I had an excess of roosters (not unexpected when you hatch chicks) and I couldn't find homes for them.

I've noticed that it seems extra difficult to rehome roosters this year. I'm really sorry you had to do the deed yourself. But I agree with Mother of Chaos: you gave them a good life and a swift death. I'm not sure how this kind of thing works itself out in the wild. I imagine the males all just fight to the death? Or drive each other off? Yours had a much kinder end.

Still stinks. Do you have a plan for how to handle this moving forward? It would be nice if you could find a contact that's happy to eat your males once you raise them up a bit. This seems like one of the harder logistics of chicken keeping, especially hatching straight run.

 

[Not-so Slick Chicken]

Seems you did what you could, and went to that as a last resort.
It sucks but sometimes there's not much you can do in certain situations.

If you provided them with...
Adequate space, shelter, water, food
Protection from predators and elements
Enrichment
Company of their own species (for social animals)

If you kept an eye on their health, separating incompatible birds, and tried to find homes (or people who would humanely dispatch them)

Then you've done what was needed and did all you could to take proper care of them.
It doesn't really get easier, but sometimes you can recognize "this is what I need to do for what my flock and myself needs"


If, in the future, you find yourself in a similar situation-- perhaps it would feel less difficult if you knew that the healthy ones you can't keep would be humanely dispatched and going to feed some other animals/pets.
(I'm not sure how somebody would go about finding/ advertising that, though)