Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Ladies-Eight]

Thank you.

It has also been one year since I lost my all time favorite rooster Rick to a bobcat. My chickens used to have a lot more freedom and movement, but now I keep them in a run; otherwise I'd lose them all eventually. I would love to let my flock free range, but they wouldn't last a day here.
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He was gorgeous and very regal.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

I am in SW Florida.

I'm in northeast Florida.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

You don’t here, either, usually. But tree companies have to haul everything off site. I have heard they will sometimes offload wood chips for free, but have never looked into it.

It's my understanding that the Landscapers will off load for free in order to have a place to dump the chips.

I have not contacted anyone around where I live.

Will let you know if I find out anymore.

 

[Windrider]

Michelle, Shad is an idealist. [no offense, Shad ] The bottom line is chickens have been domesticated ~ for better or worse. The question is, to my mind, more where do we go from here? I have a number of hens who didn't get the memo about being wild & feral . They squat for me, roost on me, groom me, follow me round like dogs ~ & I think that is ok. The relationship between human & animal can be a wonderful thing. No, it's not natural in its purest sense but it is natural when there is a co-dependent relationship & mutual trust. I think you have a wonderful relationship with your birds. I imagine, like me, with greater knowledge you are relooking @ how your tribe evolves & the breeds you keep.

Well said, Ribh. There are two extremes in chicken keeping and a whole gamut of the spectrum between them.

On the one extreme, you have the commercial industry, which only thinks of the welfare of the birds when it applies to production. On the other extreme, you have PETA, who think all domesticated animals are an abomination and slaves and should not exist.

A little less extreme, you have people on BYC who give their hatchery hens a good life but cull when the production goes down. The other side of that, you have people who keep games or semi-feral tribes that live and replicate themselves naturally, as Shad's did.

Most of us are going to fall between somewhere. Hopefully, we learn to think like a chicken and give them the best life we can. What a small and sorry world it would be without a possilbity of a connection to animals. What did Chief Seattle say, that humans would die from a great loneliness of the soul?

I came at chickens with a mentality from the dog world. I read on here for a year before I acquired my first pullets. Coming from dogs, I immediately knew I was going to go to a breeder instead of a hatchery (which my first instinct was to equate with "puppy mills for chickens," whether that is fair or not). I didn't know enough then to ask how my pullets were hatched and raised, but they obviously weren't mass produced. At my house, they didn't have acres of land, but they did get out in my garden on grass and shrubs for at least some time every day. I think it was a good life for them.

 

[RoyalChick]

Well said, Ribh. There are two extremes in chicken keeping and a whole gamut of the spectrum between them.

On the one extreme, you have the commercial industry, which only thinks of the welfare of the birds when it applies to production. On the other extreme, you have PETA, who think all domesticated animals are an abomination and slaves and should not exist.

A little less extreme, you have people on BYC who give their hatchery hens a good life but cull when the production goes down. The other side of that, you have people who keep games or semi-feral tribes that live and replicate themselves naturally, as Shad's did.

Most of us are going to fall between somewhere. Hopefully, we learn to think like a chicken and give them the best life we can. What a small and sorry world it would be without a possilbity of a connection to animals. What did Chief Seattle say, that humans would die from a great loneliness of the soul?

I came at chickens with a mentality from the dog world. I read on here for a year before I acquired my first pullets. Coming from dogs, I immediately knew I was going to go to a breeder instead of a hatchery (which my first instinct was to equate with "puppy mills for chickens," whether that is fair or not). I didn't know enough then to ask how my pullets were hatched and raised, but they obviously weren't mass produced. At my house, they didn't have acres of land, but they did get out in my garden on grass and shrubs for at least some time every day. I think it was a good life for them.

 

[Shadrach]

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?

 

[Perris]

very thought-provoking Shad. Extends to pigs, fish and many other animals 'farmed' for food.

 

[LaFleche]

there is a risk that you take already exhausted individual chickens, and instead of allowing them a hopefully speedy death (a whole other subjuct there) they get exposed to poor conditions under the care of a well-meaning but inexperienced amateur.

Sadly, this is exactly what is happing in most of the cases.

Here in Germany the people running these industrial battery farms found a cheap and clever way to get rid of the abused and sick creatures and on top getting paid for them instead of having to pay a company to get them removed. Rescuers will usually pay 5-10 euro per bird!

I once thought of taking in some of these poor creatures myself, but changed my mind after looking further into the ongoing system of animal abuse. I refuse to be a part of their system.

 

[Shadrach]

Henry. He'll see me arrive at the allotments in a while. He'll be waiting at the gate with his hens for their couple of hours of relative freedom. I'll open the gate and he and his hens will stream past me and head for the most unexplored parts of the allotment run. He and his hens know I've probably got something interesting to eat in my rucksack but they wont be hanging around my feet as soon as I open the gate. That will come later when they've felt grass under their feet, foraged for the few bugs that have come to the surface with the warmer weather and the weak sunshine that baths the allotment. Most of the hens will run, some will attempt to fly with varying degrees of success. Some look very funny for a moment as they get the flapping and foot work out of sequence and nose dive into the grass. Mostly it's a sad sight because it is quite apparent that these few moments of relative freedom in their lives mean so much to them.

 

[RoyalChick]

Henry. He'll see me arrive at the allotments in a while. He'll be waiting at the gate with his hens for their couple of hours of relative freedom. I'll open the gate and he and his hens will stream past me and head for the most unexplored parts of the allotment run. He and his hens know I've probably got something interesting to eat in my rucksack but they wont be hanging around my feet as soon as I open the gate. That will come later when they've felt grass under their feet, foraged for the few bugs that have come to the surface with the warmer weather and the weak sunshine that baths the allotment. Most of the hens will run, some will attempt to fly with varying degrees of success. Some look very funny for a moment as they get the flapping and foot work out of sequence and nose dive into the grass. Mostly it's a sad sight because it is quite apparent that these few moments of relative freedom in their lives mean so much to them.
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He is a big fella, Henry II.
It sounds like his learning to be a chicken is a lot about managing the tribe. Do you think he is getting the hang of it?