Awww Nick, she's a cutie! Looks like she might have just a touch of Maine Coon in her too.
Cetawin, I watched DeeDee at least five times this morning.
What a character! I love the way she hustles up that big butt of hers just fast enough to stay out of reach of Cheyenne!
Porch post not withstanding!
Those oats look identical to what I just bought. I'll have to look at the bag. I could have swore they said it was rolled oats.
Errrmmm...I know this is gonna sound iggerant of me, but, what is BOSS? I keep hearing y'all sing its praises, but I've never seen it in my feed store. Is this maybe a "Southern" thing?
Cyn, adorable chicks as always! Love the little cuddle ups you have in there for them too. The all look so tired, poor babies. That hatching is some pretty exhaustive work there, ya know!
Just love 'em!
Kathy, interesting article. I'd love to be able to vaccinate every single chick that ever hatches here, but it just isn't practical for me to do so. Example: GeeGee is sitting on 5 eggs. 3 are definitely developing, 2 are not. So, potentially 3 chicks, if all goes well,
The Marek's, at approximately $20 + shipping, is doable. That works out to about $8.35 per chick. Kind of pricey for mutts, but sometimes you can't put a price on love. In light of so recently loosing Lisette, I'll probably go ahead and splurge on this hatch from GeeGee and invest in protecting them against the Marek's virus. After all, they'll be the very first chicks hatched here in the way nature intended!
But sometimes, I wonder if we aren't interfering with nature by doing all of these vaccinations? What ever happened to survival of the fittest? And passing on that genetic superiority on to their progeny? Maybe Lisette wasn't fit to possibly breed in the future? And this was just nature's way of culling her out of the gene pool.
Please don't get me wrong. I loved Lisette very much, and it still hurts like h*ll every time I look at Cosette and know that Lisette isn't with us any more. But the truth of the matter is, she is the first and only chicken that I have ever lost to Marek's to the best of my knowledge. I've lost girls far younger than I thought should have died at the point of their life that they passed. Could it have been the aftermath of having fought off Marek's in its first form, only to succumb to the tumors later on?
Who knows. Could be. Could be something else entirely. Egg laying issues, some hidden disease that I was too inexperienced to recognize as being such?
.
My point here, if there is one, is that maybe we're making a mistake in vaccinating every chick we hatch. Even the experts advocate breeding for hardiness and natural resistance to Marek's and other diseases that we currently have vaccinations for. But how can we do that if we're constantly vaccinating? If birds that would have otherwise been wiped out by the disease are being vaccinated and thereby protected against the usual mortality of each disease, how do we know who could have survived without the vaccine, and who couldn't?
I'll always do whatever I can to protect my birds, and to give them the best life possible here. But somewhere, I have to draw the line. At some point I have to tell myself that my resources are finite. I try to remind myself that chickens have survived for thousands, if not millions of years before humans took a liking to them and domesticated them. They did just fine without interference from us. They'll probably be here long after we're gone.
I think I'm going to enjoy my flock to the fullest, vaccinate when and where I can afford to, and just trust to the Great Spirit for the rest of it. Sometimes I think I enjoyed my flock so much more when I didn't know about all of the unseen monsters out there, waiting to pounce on my beloved little feathered friends. Ignorance can indeed be blissful.
