How long do your chickens live?

[bawkbawkbawk]

I just read about the amazing rescue of Reva the Revenant this week:

https://polloplayer.wordpress.com/2016/08/13/taken-abawk-chickens-beat-the-odds/

and I started thinking about how long chickens live.They say that the average lifespan of a chicken is 5-7 years. Of the dozen or so hens I've had over the past seven years, only one has achieved that milestone. Some have been lost to predators but others have succumbed to a variety of known or unknown causes. Do I just have a bad track record? How long do your birds live? Do you think egg laying or size of the bird has something to do with it?

I just had my first hen make it to her fifth birthday and she is a bantam - do smaller birds tend to live longer? Do certain breeds live longer than others?

Wondering what others' experiences have been...

 

[oldhenlikesdogs]

Most of mine make it to 4-8. I haven't yet had any live past 9.

I haven't noticed any difference in my bantam verse large breeds, except my bantam roosters would live longer and my large breeds would die by 4, I realized my bantam were never fed layer but the large breed were. So now no one gets layer.

I would say roughly half die by 4, a quarter by 6, and another quarter go on longer.