- Mar 18, 2014
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I read through the whole thing and I have to apologise to the OP, and hope that my apology can cover all others who have owned, loved, and eaten eggs from their chickens. I hate to see the more forwardthinking person be bullied by people who would be called nasty names like "yokel" and "redneck" for their beliefs elsewhere. Lucky, I'm truly sorry. I know where I fall in the pile of who does what and who knows what.
There is nothing wrong with being vegan. There is nothing wrong with trying to push veganism on others. Think about it; was there anything wrong with trying to push abstinence from slavery on the south?
I'm going to give you a really good paraphrased concept from a really bad movie. Everyone draws a circle, putting what is worthy of being protected inside, while attributing no value to what is outside. Some people draw it around just themselves. Those are the selfish. Some draw their circle around just their family and friends. These are called murderers under the right conditions. Others draw a circle around just their race; those are called racists. Others draw their circle around the whole of their species. This is considered (today) moral... enough. But the size of the morally acceptable circles is getting bigger. Most people today wouldn't harm another primate, and would look down on someone who did. So we'll add in the genus and family (taxonomic family) as necessary for moral rectitude today. But what about tomorrow? I hope you people who criticised Lucky realise that tomorrow, people will look back on you the way the people of today look back on slave owners. You might treat your chickens wonderfully, but it doesn't matter; not a big enough circle.
Now a couple of things that have been said in this thread and some flat facts:
1. Don't keep laying hens in the dark for extended periods. This is exactly what the egg factories do to obtain jumbo eggs (and quite unnaturally and painfully to the chicken I might add). This doesn't stop the hen from laying eggs; rather it forces the egg to stay inside the chicken and grow for a longer time, forcing it bigger. Older hens lay bigger eggs naturally, but they aren't as productive.
2. Chickens make really wonderful pets. If you have a parrot and a chicken, you probably know this already. One is a wild animal. The other is not. Unfortunately the best pet chicken is a female, as it is with many animals. Some people are having better successes at making pet roosters than I ever did, but all I can say from my experience is that I definitely don't recommend getting rid of hens in favour of roosters. Firstly my experience that they try to gouge my eyes out, but secondly the structure is wrong. Chickens are social animals. They're also not monogamous. Roosters struggle amongst themselves for dominance, and the most dominant bird gets all the females. This is why people keep one or two roosters to one or two dozen hens. This is natural. Firstly one chicken alone is a sad chicken, and secondly a flock of roosters is a flock of love-starved trouble tearing each other apart. You can't really have that either. People will think you're keeping them for cock fighting.
Nothing wrong with wanting chickens as pets only (and having nothing to do with food) but imo you still need to base your flock on females. Think of chickens like lions. Some people who have (or treat) lions as pets have packs of males. But there are problems. They do fight sometimes. Maybe you can use the same tricks they use, and only use closely-related males. Big cats have this weird innate knowledge that, "Those are my genes anyway, so no point in fighting with this fellow." I have no clue if chickens have the same understanding, only that their social structures are similar so it's a fair bet. Flock of roosters... Just never heard of anyone wanting such a thing. New ground there.
3. You mentioned buying a broody hen to incubate the eggs... That's just going to add to the problem! The problem is that the hen makes more eggs than she could possibly incubate, thanks to being bred for thousands of generations to do so! Get an incubator. If you really believe each fertlised cell has a right to become a fully formed life, you must get an incubator if you cannot separate roosters and hens. The sad thing is you can't just separate them either. There is no way to know how long the eggs stay fertile! From a single mating, a hen can produce fertile eggs for a week.
It wasn't fully explained, I don't think, that if you get rid of your roosters, the hens will continue to produce eggs, and they will be unfertilised. The hen, at that point, is going through the equivalent of a period. She's been bred to have them once a day, so she does. If you want to eat it, great, you saved the life of a stalk of broccoli, or whatever else you were about to eat. If you don't want to eat it, it will still get eaten. If nothing else, bacteria will make use of the powerhouse of proteins inside originally designed so that a chick could thrive. If feeding the egg back to the chicken seems gross, what about feeding it to another animal? Is there too much difference in allowing bacteria to consume (and rot) it, and allowing another animal to do so?
I hope others can start to see the problem here. It's as if you wanted a cat for a pet, but the only pet cat was bred as a utility animal. Picture the same lovable, rubbing, purring, affectionate, soft fur bundles we all know... And picture them bred to shed their limbs sequentially so humans could eat them. This is kind of what this person is going through (I think) and since laying so many eggs probably does detract from the chicken's life span, it's not too far off. (Okay it's a huge stretch. Fine. It's still valuable as a visualisation.) When the person asks, "How do I stop them from doing that?" I can see why.
There is nothing wrong with being vegan. There is nothing wrong with trying to push veganism on others. Think about it; was there anything wrong with trying to push abstinence from slavery on the south?
I'm going to give you a really good paraphrased concept from a really bad movie. Everyone draws a circle, putting what is worthy of being protected inside, while attributing no value to what is outside. Some people draw it around just themselves. Those are the selfish. Some draw their circle around just their family and friends. These are called murderers under the right conditions. Others draw a circle around just their race; those are called racists. Others draw their circle around the whole of their species. This is considered (today) moral... enough. But the size of the morally acceptable circles is getting bigger. Most people today wouldn't harm another primate, and would look down on someone who did. So we'll add in the genus and family (taxonomic family) as necessary for moral rectitude today. But what about tomorrow? I hope you people who criticised Lucky realise that tomorrow, people will look back on you the way the people of today look back on slave owners. You might treat your chickens wonderfully, but it doesn't matter; not a big enough circle.
Now a couple of things that have been said in this thread and some flat facts:
1. Don't keep laying hens in the dark for extended periods. This is exactly what the egg factories do to obtain jumbo eggs (and quite unnaturally and painfully to the chicken I might add). This doesn't stop the hen from laying eggs; rather it forces the egg to stay inside the chicken and grow for a longer time, forcing it bigger. Older hens lay bigger eggs naturally, but they aren't as productive.
2. Chickens make really wonderful pets. If you have a parrot and a chicken, you probably know this already. One is a wild animal. The other is not. Unfortunately the best pet chicken is a female, as it is with many animals. Some people are having better successes at making pet roosters than I ever did, but all I can say from my experience is that I definitely don't recommend getting rid of hens in favour of roosters. Firstly my experience that they try to gouge my eyes out, but secondly the structure is wrong. Chickens are social animals. They're also not monogamous. Roosters struggle amongst themselves for dominance, and the most dominant bird gets all the females. This is why people keep one or two roosters to one or two dozen hens. This is natural. Firstly one chicken alone is a sad chicken, and secondly a flock of roosters is a flock of love-starved trouble tearing each other apart. You can't really have that either. People will think you're keeping them for cock fighting.
Nothing wrong with wanting chickens as pets only (and having nothing to do with food) but imo you still need to base your flock on females. Think of chickens like lions. Some people who have (or treat) lions as pets have packs of males. But there are problems. They do fight sometimes. Maybe you can use the same tricks they use, and only use closely-related males. Big cats have this weird innate knowledge that, "Those are my genes anyway, so no point in fighting with this fellow." I have no clue if chickens have the same understanding, only that their social structures are similar so it's a fair bet. Flock of roosters... Just never heard of anyone wanting such a thing. New ground there.
3. You mentioned buying a broody hen to incubate the eggs... That's just going to add to the problem! The problem is that the hen makes more eggs than she could possibly incubate, thanks to being bred for thousands of generations to do so! Get an incubator. If you really believe each fertlised cell has a right to become a fully formed life, you must get an incubator if you cannot separate roosters and hens. The sad thing is you can't just separate them either. There is no way to know how long the eggs stay fertile! From a single mating, a hen can produce fertile eggs for a week.
It wasn't fully explained, I don't think, that if you get rid of your roosters, the hens will continue to produce eggs, and they will be unfertilised. The hen, at that point, is going through the equivalent of a period. She's been bred to have them once a day, so she does. If you want to eat it, great, you saved the life of a stalk of broccoli, or whatever else you were about to eat. If you don't want to eat it, it will still get eaten. If nothing else, bacteria will make use of the powerhouse of proteins inside originally designed so that a chick could thrive. If feeding the egg back to the chicken seems gross, what about feeding it to another animal? Is there too much difference in allowing bacteria to consume (and rot) it, and allowing another animal to do so?
I hope others can start to see the problem here. It's as if you wanted a cat for a pet, but the only pet cat was bred as a utility animal. Picture the same lovable, rubbing, purring, affectionate, soft fur bundles we all know... And picture them bred to shed their limbs sequentially so humans could eat them. This is kind of what this person is going through (I think) and since laying so many eggs probably does detract from the chicken's life span, it's not too far off. (Okay it's a huge stretch. Fine. It's still valuable as a visualisation.) When the person asks, "How do I stop them from doing that?" I can see why.
