Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[micstrachan]

Funny though don't you think. People have been keeping chickens for thousands of years and it has only been recently that much has been done to study much more than how to buther them and make them produce more eggs.

Yes, funny. Well, sad, actually. Or if I dare say, disgusting.

 

[micstrachan]

Here you go @Windrider

I remember that video. She looks very unbothered by it, and might even enjoy it. I miss my chickens this time of year. Days are too short and I have to work to pay the bills.

 

[micstrachan]

The hen I want to have a look at is behind the highest Legbar.
I need to give her some eye drops.
View attachment 2927066

Oh my gosh. Good luck with that! That is crazy crowded. Can you remind us what the ventilation is like?

 

[micstrachan]

Good night my battery chickens friends

@shadach
I left you a message in maryjanet s thread. You are right about the fermented feed. Its softened the shells

Good to know! I haven’t given fermented feed in awhile, but have sporadically in the past. They tend to love it and then suddenly get sick of it.

 

[micstrachan]

Nope, it's not the Ex Batts. It's Matilda and Cloud mostly. The Ex Batts watch and they'll check the holes out but I've yet to see any of them do any major digging.
View attachment 2927273

Really? I hope they learn how! I know, I know. The door might be closed on that possibility. But I can hope anyway! If nothing else, it will be interesting to follow their journey andthey are all looking so much better!

 

[micstrachan]

I've said this many times since bringing home our first chicks. It shocked me how little we humans know about an animal we've relied on [exploited] desperately for thousands of years. I also couldn't believe how old I was when I realized this, sigh.

Honey bees are another good example. Beekeeping practices have been nudged forward by pockets of research, in fits & starts, over the centuries. It's surprising how slowly practices have evolved, considering how many people keep bees.

What have we humans been doing with our time??

Being self-centered and gossiping, sadly. Wasting time on a bunch of bull$h1t.

 

[micstrachan]

Shad, I’m still 15 pages behind, but had a thought for these birds in your current set up. I know it would not be ideal to limit their space. However, might it be worth it if the space were more rich, nutritious and stimulating? Something you said made me think they might forage it down to just dirt. Might you consider dividing it in two and rotating their pastures so things have a chance to grow and maybe even reseed?

 

[micstrachan]

There are a few sort of interrelated topics running through this thread.

There is my disgust at Pear Tree Farms and to a certain extent C who got these Ex Batts and my reservations about the whole chicken rescue business.

There is the what is a proper chicken debate.

There is the day to day progress of these Rescues and Ex Batts.

Running through these are various studies and views on which I hope we may come to some consensus that will help with understanding the chicken and why there is a problem in the first place.

There are a couple of things that I suggest are reasonably well established.

Chickens have been around for around 8000 years.

According to people who have studied the history of the chicken along with those who have studied the biology of the chicken, the chicken hasn’t changed much in anything apart from looks for at least 5000 of those years.

Most important is the science says chicken behaviour hasn’t really changed in the 5000 year period either. They’ve been doing the same stuff wherever they been taken.

To know what that stuff that chickens do is, they have to be observed doing it and all over the world there are people who do know what chickens do because the chicken is one of the few domesticated creatures that have coexisted with humans rather than being kept by humans for centuries. The average Asian village kid could probably tell us more about how chickens behave than most studies and that is because of how chickens have been kept in a great many places in the world.

The great advantage, particularly for the poor is the chicken is completely omnivorous and self replicating. You get a couple of hens and a rooster feed them kitchen scraps, perhaps provide them with some form of rudimentary shelter and the chickens take care of themselves. They tend not to wander far from their source of food and water and even with fairly sparse forage they will survive and the hens will lay eggs which the human looks for and collects. Most villages I’ve visited in Asia still have chickens running around free range as do the villages in Africa my niece has visited with her studies and even here on BYC the occasional poster from Iran, or China shows up and posts pictures of chickens living much as I’ve described above. There were a number of places in Catalonia I visited where chickens were kept like this, not even provided with any special housing; they just roosted where they felt safe around the farms and even did this in some of the small towns. There aren’t many other domesticated creatures I can think of that will live like this apart from some breeds of goats.

When I lived in Catalonia I tried to replicate the “traditional” way of keeping chickens, encouraging what were quite highly domesticated breeds to live a semi feral life in order to study their behaviour.

I’ve written lots about them all over BYC but two things were very noticeable. The Marans got progressively slimmer each generation and more broody. The bantams didn’t change much in size but tended to be more feral than the early generations of Marans. The cross breeds tended to be stocky but smaller then the Marans and they also became more feral to the point that they were pro tree huggers in a single generation. They all went broody at least once a year. If I hadn’t limited the number of eggs they sat on I would have had hundreds of chickens. Of course, many would have died through predation but the climate and environment was just warm enough withjust enough forage that should I have been able to continue I would have had feral chicken populations running around the National Park, much like my friend with his Fayoumies.

In 1923 a Mrs Wilmer Steele of Delaware USA changed all this when she developed what was probably the first chicken battery of 500 hens, and about three years later a battery barn for 10000 hens.

Life for the chicken has gone downhill very rapidly since.

Before these events chickens on average laid less than 100 eggs a year. Breeders in the USA set about trying to increase the number of eggs a hen could lay and by the end of the Second World War hens in the USA were laying up to 250 eggs a year.

What doesn’t often get mentioned s the hens life expectancy reduced in line with her higher productivity.

The American battery system got promoted throughout the industrialised countries and along with this came further breeding “improvements” and chicken meat became commonplace where before it had been a bit of a luxury with only roosters being eaten from the hen’s clutches because the unaltered hen would lay a modest amount of eggs for around ten years instead of lots of eggs in her first two.

For many small farms, particularly outside the USA the hen was a low cost regular source of protein and roosters were kept in order for the chickens to reproduce.

With the increasing availability of electric power the incubator superseded the hen and we headed to the situation we are in today where you can pick a chick out of a supermarket bin for less than a dollar I’m told in the USA, that has never seen an adult chicken let alone it’s mother or siblings and will probably never know the life that it’s ancestors had lived for thousands of years before.

Oh, a picture for By Bob because he's moaned about the amount he has to read.View attachment 2928215

I hate Mrs. Wilmer Steele. Just sayin.

 

[micstrachan]

That's Mag standing on the wall. That's his tribe up the tree. None of them are remotley interested in being cuddled or being anyones pet.
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Love Mag and his tree hugging tribe!

 

[BigBlueHen53]

I finally caught up to myself and I'm still 30 pages behind. There were not a lot of pictures. Many long wordy posts. I'm just pointing it out.

Chicken tax
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I like the lengthy, informative posts, for the most part. As well as the wordy, thoughtful ones. And the great pics! Loving the tax idea, we should do it more often!