Proud to be a new BYC member!

Hello everyone! So glad I found this website and honored to be a new member! We got our first chicken 1 year ago. Her name is Gloria and she's a Rhode Island Red. She wandered into our yard and kept roosting on top off my husbands work truck (a large boom truck) and we checked with neighbors to see who she belonged to and no one would claim her (could be because we live in the city?) were worried something might kill her so I asked my husband to build a roosting box on our shed thinking she could use it at night for protection and I came home one day to a really nice large chicken coop that could hold 6 chickens or so! My son 14, and daughter 12, wanted more chickens so they researched chicken breeds they wanted and we now have 3 silkies and frizzle! They were 6,5,4,3 weeks old when we got them there now 5 months old. I've posted there pictures and asked for some sexing help a couple of times. We're still not sure who's what yet but were having tons of fun with them. They are the neatest pets we've ever had and we currently have 2 large boxers Brutus and Harley, 1 naughty cockatoo, Brandy and a Parakeete named Louie and our newest addition is a grey cockatiel, Sheldon! So excited to be a new member to back yard chickens! I wish I would have known about this web site back in July when our baby chick Murphy got sick with a cold! I did find a very knowledgeable person at a tsc that was able to help but that was after I spent several hours trying to find a vet to see my chicken, everyone thought I was nuts. All I kept hearing was Its just a chicken!" Now it's good to know there are others out there that love and care about there chickens just as much as I do! It's so nice to know there are so many helpful people out there that are willing to help with all sorts of chicken questions. I can't wait to see what the future brings and what we can learn!

 

Thanks for the info on the dogs and chickens! We always make sure they have no contact with each other at all, the coop is far enough away from where our dogs get tied out too but we have a new neighbor that lets his dog walk with out a leash and it runs over to our chicken coop and scares the daylights out of the chickens. ( Its a large golden retriever) We have made a tractor (think that's what they call a portable chicken run so they can be safe in the yard) we put then in that and we just spent several hundred dollars in hardware wire to make sure our baby's are safe! We never read anything on types of chicken wire until I recently found something that said never use chicken wire it's not safe so we had to redo the whole coop! We found when our neighbors dog jumped on the side of the fence it pushed the wires apart a bit so I wouldn't put my babies outside until my husband made it 100% safe and our chicks were living in our bathroom in a dog kennel for several weeks and the dogs wiuld have loved to have had them as a snack. (we tell them they can only eat cooked chicken!) Don't understand the neighbor and his dog, my dogs are always walked on a leash and always tied out never running around free because were trying to be responsible pet owners and keep all of our pets safe and other people's pets because they are animals after all. But I know what your saying about dogs and birds, our dog Harley and my cockatoo hate each other and we do have some ugly moments with the bird screaming squawking on the bottom of his cage and the dog stands on his back feet with front feet on the cage and they just go at if until we break it up, thank goodness the cage is really large and really well built and it doesn't happen often! As for my neighbor (who's a doctor) my husband just says "Ya can't fix stupid!"