New York Times - "When the Problems Come Home to Roost"

[Kansaseq]

Quote:
Well said. There will always be irresponsible people who jump onto the current trendy pet, and dump them when they become inconvenient. It speaks to the character of people, not the animals they own.

 

[halo]

The article makes it sound like the rescues will be over-run with roosters and hens that owners are turning loose,or turning in to rescues.

Do people forget that you can EAT CHICKENS??? Why not donate all the unwanted chickens to homeless shelters, and food banks.

 

[ducks4you]

halo is right about the fact that there are many people HAPPY to take your unwanted roosters--ME, TOO, now that I've sent mine to freezer camp. Quail_Antwerp has boldly gone where most of us FEAR TO GO--to the calculator to figure out what our animals REALLY cost us!!
I believe that we have been going towards a society totally removed from ANY animal contact. A LOT of city dwellers, certainly much larger in number than rural residents since the early 1960's, are happy to eat chicken, but have NO IDEA how it works. (YOU know, when they ask if you need a rooster to have a chicken lay eggs, and questions like that.) KDOGG331 has a thread going about wanting a horse, but many BYCers who ARE horse-owners know that can be a phase for many people. (If you abandon a chicken, you know that they are relatively short-lived. I'm losing very old horses ALL close to or over 30 years of ago, and have had 3 dogs in that same period of time.)
Obviously the NYT's writers are intrigued at the curiousity of people new to farm animals. ANYBODY who has kept ANY kind of animals over the years knows that exposure first, and genetics, second are responsible for a lot of animal diseases. We've read the threads of BYCers who keep immaculate coops but their animals get sick, and the ones who "fudge" with the cleaning but their birds aren't sick. I THINK that we have the right to be accountable to each other because we're on this forum together.
So what is the result of these articles? I do not believe that it will prevent anyone from getting birds because our reasons do not rest upon reading a NYT article on chickens. But, we should be vigilent lest ANY chicken diseases cross over to humans and peope become scared that we MIGHT be the cause of an epidemic.