Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

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Shadrach said:
@micstrachan
Two of the Legbars, Copy and Carbon I think have started pecking my shoes. Just thought you might like to know given yours pecks your ankles.
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Actually it is me with the Legbar who pecks ankles (Dotty).
Maybe ankle pecking is a breed standard.
I think @micstrachan's Legbar (Flash I think) is better behaved.
 
I showed dog professionally for 34 years ... Chickens no way.. Ya know My best friend is our Post mistress. I am giving her a hatch of birds pullets .. The white pullet is going in my main coop.. Never added a single bird ..
I wanted to ask will smudge treat a son better than a cockerel that is not related ? I had a hatch of two one being the barred cockerel.
 

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RoyalChick said:
Actually it is me with the Legbar who pecks ankles (Dotty).
Maybe ankle pecking is a breed standard.
I think @micstrachan's Legbar (Flash I think) is better behaved.
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Flash does not peck my ankles, but Flo, my Australorp, does. I may have posted a video of that recently. In this apple treat video, she pecks me while I am squatting down at their level.
 
Windrider said:
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.
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LaFleche said:
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.
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The best way to enact change with big industry seems to be to vote with your feet/wallet. One person may not make enough of a difference but when enough start demanding for things to change, then it makes a difference. More people want humane conditions for the animals that produce their food, but the food production industry is very good at finding loopholes and marketing.

“Humanely raised” “cage free” “free range” and small those sorts of labels are practically meaningless but at least it’s sort of a step in the right direction, in that it gets people thinking more about the sorts of conditions those animals are kept in.

I started keeping chickens as part of a larger effort to remove myself from the industrial food chain. It’s been slow changes, but I can source almost all of my meat from local farmers, and a fair amount of my produce is either grown by me or bought locally. I eat more seasonally because I’m buying what’s available, and that includes eating fewer eggs in the winter. It’s taken some adjustment, but not in a bad way. I think not having something for a while makes you appreciate it all the more when you have it again.

While my chickens can’t free range in small tribes because of where I live, I do my best to make sure they have plenty of space in the coop/run and that they get time to forage in the afternoon when there’s forage to be had. Are they living the perfect chicken life? I guess it depends on who you talk to. But it does mean that I’m not buying eggs from stores who are getting those eggs from chickens in far worse conditions than my flock. So I think that’s definitely a step in the right direction to ensure that the animals we watch over are treated the way they deserve. There’s always room for improvement towards the ideal, but that doesn’t mean the improvement is worthless.
 
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Solanacae said:
I started keeping chickens as part of a larger effort to remove myself from the industrial food chain. It’s been slow changes, but I can source almost all of my meat from local farmers, and a fair amount of my produce is either grown by me or bought locally. I eat more seasonally because I’m buying what’s available, and that includes eating fewer eggs in the winter. It’s taken some adjustment, but not in a bad way. I think not having something for a while makes you appreciate it all the more when you have it again.
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same here. Plus I get my veg from a local CSA scheme, which has had the unintended consequence of introducing me to veg I'd never used before and wouldn't pick at the supermarket (or wouldn't be available there, like scrapes), and finding out how to prepare it, which has led me to new flavours and recipes. Any surplus goes to the mealworms, and they go to the chickens, so there's no waste either :)
 
micstrachan said:
Flash does not peck my ankles, but Flo, my Australorp, does. I may have posted a video of that recently. In this apple treat video, she pecks me while I am squatting down at their level.
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You can hardly blame her for pecking you. Those are very tasty looking pajama pants!
 

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