Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Marie2020]

Is she moulting or have they been pecked out?

The rest of her feathers are fine just her throat

 

[Marie2020]

Tina makes my heart melt she's so cheeky and just adorable

 

[GregnLety]

We are hatching a mixed batch for a friend. Bantam cochin, EE's, Lavender orpingtons, and Japanese bantam.

 

[Ribh]

The rest of her feathers are fine just her throat

Can you get a picture, @Marie2020 ? Some of my girls will denude chest/neck feathers when they go broody & start nest making & while that is unlikely during your winter I'd put nothing past some of these chooks.

 

[Marie2020]

Can you get a picture, @Marie2020 ? Some of my girls will denude chest/neck feathers when they go broody & start nest making & while that is unlikely during your winter I'd put nothing past some of these chooks.

I will get one in the morning, she's a rescue. She loves her food and beating on anything. I think she was a drummer in her last life

 

[no fly zone]

Skeksis and Mr. Bumble, who I am hoping to get some offspring from.

 

[Marie2020]

I've loathed too do this but she knows I won't hurt her and I took that picture now.
I have very little chance of doing this in the morning as she's running about as busy as a bee and I'm dashing around with feeding and cleaning out the coop.

@Shadrach

My sleepy cute girl

 

[Sortacountrychicken]

Shadrach, it's good to see those chickens out and about. Has Lima been the lapsitter in your recent pictures or is that someone else?

Does the dying hen have a name? I tend to name dying birds if they don't have a name already. There's something about burying someone nameless that just doesn't feel right to me.

The group as a whole looks to be faring quite well. How has your new helper been doing?

It's been downright miserable here lately but our daytime highs are supposed to go up about 30 degrees for the next week or so which everyone will enjoy.

There's not much left in the tax fund here so this will have to do for now. This is one of the hatchery pullets from last spring. She went egg bound a few days ago but cleared it on her own. I'm waiting to see a good egg from her. She laid a good egg 2 days ago and then laid a shell less egg very early this morning. She's one of 4 hens laying currently.

 

[Iluveggers]

Yes, she's a Red Sex Link and a production hen.
The RSL seem very healthy in general now and the more recent arrivals so consequently younger are the most active at a bit over two years old.
The Legbars apart from Fret who is a cross are at least six years old and this must have some influence on their behaviour.
The RSL look and act like very healthy hens compared to how they were back in September when I first started making sure they got fed and out of the coop run.
It's very hard to make any relevant comparison because I've only spent around 250 hours with them so far.
It took me at least a year of six to eight hours a day with the tribes in Catalonia to make much of a judgement about health, attitude and behaviour.

I would infer that your involvement and care is greatly improving the lives of these chickens.

 

[micstrachan]

I must have missed the era when Idealism became pursuit of fools and dreamers.

I guess we've all got to stick with the program these days, unquestioning and trotting out the usual dogma about the real world and practicalities.

Domesticated; now there's an interesting word.

"adapted over time (as by selective breeding) from a wild or natural state to life in close association with and to the benefit of humans"

I can't see anything in this definition that demands that the process of domestication necessitates the reduction of a creatures life span by one third or more, or any of the other atrocities inflicted on the chicken.

Domestication does not necessarily need to be an abusive process.

I read the satement that chickens have been domesticated a lot. I read that domestication has changed the chicken so fundamentaly that all those things that were relevant to the chickens ancestors are no longer applicable to the domesticated chicken.

The problem is that isn't what the science has found. It's a perception based on ignorance and even worse a perception based on some value judgement that has absolutely no bearing on reality.

Of course, those who can't be bothered to read the growing number of studies (some of which I've provided in this thread) and prefer to stick to their subjective view of the chicken because it helps them to feel comfortable about the abuses they've inflicted on the chicken are never going to change their view, or their behaviour.

Education, it seems is yet another "thing" that has fallen into disregard along with idealism.

Quite early on in this thread I deliberately told a bit of the story of Mr Young, my Uncle’s farm manager who viewed the hens kept in the batteries as a creature less than a chicken. I did this in part because it was only a matter of time before the term domesticated came under discussion and this too has become a term used to describe a creature as something less than a chicken.

We now have a range of chickens with differing attributes it seems.

There is the jungle fowl and according to some, many of the “natural” behaviours of the jungle fowl have been bred out of the domesticated chicken.

There are what are best described as semi feral populations and even with these some people will say some of the natural behaviours have been bred out of these too.

Then we have the typical back yard chicken who also have apparently lost many of their “natural” behaviour drives.

Lastly we have the battery hen and she is hardly a chicken at all in the view of some people.

The things is, the science tells a rather different story. It seems from the various studies that while there have been some physiological changes such as the enlarging of some areas in the brain and changes in weight and size, essentially with regard to their behaviour the chicken in the battery cage is much the same as the jungle fowl.

Read the studies. Rather than pick out the few examples of the relatively minor changes consider all those behaviours that haven’t changed at all.

So, if I now write we are keeping jungle fowl in cages and unnatural groups which cause stress and disease and long term health damage to the species, does that help put my idealism in a better perspective?

It does. I am looking forward to watching the allotment birds get their instincts and natural behaviors back. I will also continue to nurture the natural behaviors of the birds in my charge the best I can, short of letting them free range all day unsupervised. Perhaps someday I will live in a stable setting where I can allow that.