My perfect flock ruined by Rural King. Need advice for new flock.

[mommacb]

Rural king sold us chickens that were marked RIR pullets also and we ended up with just one rooster. You really can't trust just anyone, take someone who is a 4H veteran with you, they might be able to help you.

 

[Cindy in PA]

Rural king sold us chickens that were marked RIR pullets also and we ended up with just one rooster. You really can't trust just anyone, take someone who is a 4H veteran with you, they might be able to help you.

Sexing is not 100%. Most hatcheries only guarantee 90% correct, so with 10 chicks you might get 1 or more roosters. Add randomly picking from a "pullet" bin & you could conceivably end up with the 10% roosters of the whole order. Except for some breeds, it is virtually impossible to tell what sex a few days old chick is by looking at it. It's the luck of the draw.

 

[mommacb]

good to know. so next time we buy, we need to have rooster homes lined up ha!

 

[mommacb]

ps. how do hatcheries know 90% if it's so hard to tell?

 

[Achickenwrangler#1]

They know. 10% is a huge margin for error, they have no excuse to send a 90% error, but will take no responsibility. How DO they stay in business.?

 

[Cindy in PA]

They know. 10% is a huge margin for error, they have no excuse to send a 90% error, but will take no responsibility. How DO they stay in business.?

I imagine they do it rather quickly & also imagine they can't spend a lot of money (wages) making sure you get only hens! They state that they are 90% or whatever correct. You are told up front, so if you don't like the odds, don't buy from them. JMHO

 

[mommacb]

how do they decide which is which??

 

[Achickenwrangler#1]

Five out of six is not 90% accuracy, can't you send them back? Any sort of cupability? So somebody has a bad day and just tosses whatever into a box, or maybe they are new and not so hot at sexing chicks...I've read alot of threads where this has happened and mentally click that hatchery into the never order from them category. Ultimately I'd think the owner would want to build a reputation for honest reliable business, but that seems an outmoded ideal these days. Also the practice of tossing in a few extra chicks for packing peanuts is outlandish...who wants that..most likely roos you have to deal with sooner or later. So no. I won't buy from them ever.

 

[Fred's Hens]

The OP's chicks were bought from a rural store. Rural King is similar to TSC, only on steroids.

Chicks get dumped into wrong bins, people mess with them and put them back into wrong bins, near minimum wage employees can only know so much and often, sadly, only care so much. Buying birds from any such place is often a crap shoot all the way around. A wise manager might hand you $12 and say, here's a refund, or give you a $12 store credit, but even that seems highly unlikely.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

I was talking to someone from a hatchery the other day ... they said sexing chickens is an art, it takes years to learn, the training sounds rather "inconvenient," and people who sex chicks get paid a HUGE amount of money. To me, that says sexing chicks isn't the easiest thing to do, so I'm not surprised it isn't always 100% accurate. I watched a cool video about it on YouTube, part of the "Dirty Jobs" series.

When we bought our first flock we just took what they pulled out of the bin at the feed store for us. We got some roosters in with the mix ... we bought between 5 - 10 each of six or so breeds, and got one rooster/breed with three of the breeds. We bought some SR bantams, and the percentage of roosters was much higher than for the sexed chicks.

This time, we are testing our sexing abilities and were more careful about what we brought home (and now they know us at the feed store, so were happy to let us fish around for our own chicks). Who knows if the chicks were young enough to sex, or our technique was up to snuff. It was funny, the guy at the feed store was standing over Nelson's shoulder as he was picking his birds, and with just a casual look he seemed confident about his ability to sex the chicks -- which makes me wonder why they would be left in the "sexed" bin for other customers.

Anywho ... maybe between the two of them they got it 100% right. Time will tell.