How come people are so anxious to help chicks hatch?

[ebonykawai]

Can we please sticky this topic? Or at least unsticky the "helping hatch" topic?

 

[hinkjc]

I want to thank everyone for their candid participation in this post. The intent was to help folks understand that it isn't necessary (and probably not a good practice) to intervene as soon as you see pips or within those first 24 hours of pip.

Most of the posts I see that actually did require intervention were due to human error, not incubation (or its artificial components). People are opening the incubator to remove chicks due to impatience, instead of waiting for the hatch to complete. It is important to remember that chicks can go 3 days without food/water and it is better to wait for the hatch to finish to reduce impact to unhatched/pipping eggs. The drying that occurs is caused by opening the incubator and affecting the environment. If the incubator is left alone, all hatchable/healthy chicks WILL hatch.

I am not sure this needs to be stickied and I also feel the one about intervention should be unstickied. It should be a searchable topic like everything else, not the #1 topic in this section. It is misleading and educating improper incubation, which is not helping hatches but hurting them and reducing hatchability of eggs.

P.S. For those who help after a hatch is "considered" complete, that is your judgment call and entirely up to you if you want to take the chances based on your inidividual situation. Best wishes to all on your approach. Just thought I'd share some additional thoughts.

Jody

 

[MaransGuy]

Hi Jody,

I agree with what you are saying. I am sure that the idea behind making the helping topic a sticky was to make it easier to find but agree that it's presence as a sticky tends to suggest that helping is something routine and not unusual. I also know that what I am about to say will not be too popular as well but I think you hit the nail on the head when you said :

If the incubator is left alone, all hatchable/healthy chicks WILL hatch.

By helping chicks to hatch that would not otherwise may result in a perfectly appearing bird, however, by doing so we are constantly selecting for chicks that need help hatching. This has been brought up many times on other boards, especially in the case of call ducks. I have never raised them but from what I have learned from reading is that they can have very poor hatchability due to the conformation of the bird and the short beak. Only the strongest chicks will survive and be able to hatch and it is only those birds breeders are looking to work with.

Now, with all of that being said, deciding to help or not is up to the keeper. However, I think that before you "help" hatching you should have a full and complete understanding of what is actually going on inside that shell on a physiological level. Otherwise, what you may think is a problem may very well not be and the decision you make will have disastrous effects. Only by understanding what is happening, and what your actions may cause, can you make a good decision on whether to proceed or not. It is for that reason that I think a sticky thread explaining the biological processes of the embryo would be beneficial. I don't think it should be presented in the context of "helping" to hatch at all, but simply as an educational tool.

Richard​

 

[hinkjc]

Richard, I think that is a great idea. We could add it into or build off of the "hatching egg care guide" and use that sticky for "incubation and hatching information". Sort of a compilation of educational info and help links for troubleshooting hatches.

Jody

 

[ebonykawai]

I think that's a great idea, too!

 

[sara]

Great idea! Thank you all for this thread, I think its great.

I think it's human nature to want to save all the chicks, and we think by helping them we are doing something good. In nature it goes by survival of the strongest for a reason, to weed out defects.

I want to build the healthiest flock I can, therefore I wont help any chicks hatch. I have tried it twice in the past, and both times I should have let nature take its course as there was something wrong with the chicks and they died in the end anyway.

 

[MaransGuy]

It would be great if we could get this to happen and I think it would help a lot of people, especially those just starting out. Many people on here are not veteran hatchers and I know I learned alot from my own experiences. What I found to be the most common reasons for dead-in-shell were temps too high, and too high of a humidity level. Another reason that can contribute to it is too little ventilation. All of these can give the appearance that the chick suffocated, drowned, etc... and results are that they do not pip and die. The more info people have the better decisions they can make.

Richard

 

[Tuffoldhen]

I'm certainly in agreement....

 

[Leslie In North Pole]

What if you had stickied at the top:

HOT Topics and Popular Searches

And when clicked on, it generated automatic searches of specific topics like: Temperatures, Humidity, Incubator Recommendations, Build your own Incubators, Candling, What happens during incubation, What happens during hatching, Incubation trouble shooting, Hatching Trouble shooting, Common Incubating Myths

A lot of people have questions but don't know how to word them to search, I have noticed. If you give them key words that they can click on, maybe it will help cut down on so many "duplicate" posts. I love to offer advice as much as the next person but after awhile, it feels like I have seen the same question multiple times a day and sometimes peoples posts get ignored because of this. It is almost like a big "STOP" needs to flash across the screen when someone goes to post that says "Have you looked to see if anyone else has asked this question recently?"

I am not an advocate of helping hatch... doesn't mean I haven't. It is a personal choice and I usually only do it when human error has created an issue with very valuable eggs. I will be the first to tell you, many eggs make it to pip even under momma and don't hatch because something is wrong with the chick, that is nature. It definitely would be nice to see more of "Back away from the Bator" as micromanaging seems cause more harm to peoples hatches than anything else... Maybe we need a sticky with selected posts from some of our true in-house experts on how they have successfully hatched for the past several years. Many people seem to be giving advice, which is great but only a few have been doing it for any amount of time.

 

[tntstanifer]

Quote:
Good point Lisa!