Meat Birds and Egg laying...

[Kabootar]

it’s not the easiest thing to do from what I’ve read, and for 20 birds at a time... I’ll just stick to ending them as they become hostile to each other.

That's true it takes some practice to master the art of caponizing. Now I can caponize a cockerel in less than two minutes, but when my father was teaching me the skill I was very nervous. I said that I may kill a few of them, he said "dont worry we will have a chicken dinner tonight" then I said that I may kill far too many, he said "we will invite the village."

We have a breeding operation on our farm so we cannot afford having culls and barnyard mutts running around. So it is a good thing that I learned.

 

[Kabootar]

They were raised by another local farmer we are developing closer ties with, and I picked her up at 6 1/2 weeks old (they were from the same order as my Red Ranger chicks) I’m pretty sure they are pushing 17–18lbs live weight now, mostly due to breeding. The CX we have here grow ridiculously large extremely fast. The last of my rangers which I processed at 14 weeks were 6-7lbs dressed out.

Cornish cross birds are same everywhere. They do nothing but sit and eat. Generally I am not a very emotional person, people say I am very practical, but hearing a large birds chirping like chicks always gets me.
One day I was selling a batch of CX to our local butcher and I saw one of my hens running around with her chicks of exact same age as CX batch tagged behind her and it was really disturbing.

We still don't have the Red Rangers in our country, but anyway I hope you will keep me updated with your experiment.

 

[Kris5902]

Cornish cross birds are same everywhere. They do nothing but sit and eat. Generally I am not a very emotional person, people say I am very practical, but hearing a large birds chirping like chicks always gets me.
One day I was selling a batch of CX to our local butcher and I saw one of my hens running around with her chicks of exact same age as CX batch tagged behind her and it was really disturbing.

We still don't have the Red Rangers in our country, but anyway I hope you will keep me updated with your experiment.

That’s different... my rangers started crowing at 8-9 weeks, but the CX make more of a honking noise my sole female ranger is mostly quiet. I’ve read that it is harder to get some heritage breeds in India, like the RIR. It’s good that you’re keeping your breeding stock pure then, and I can totally see how caponizing would be necessary in that sort of situation. I am using chicken tractors for breeding pens to isolate the parents, but in a free range setting I can see how things could quickly spiral out of control.

What sort of breeds do you have and focus on? I’m always interested in farming methods in other countries, as so much of the poultry industry in North America is controlled by giant corporations that don’t really care about the animals, just the profit margins and staying just within the bare minimum society will tolerate For “humane” conditions.