Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[MrsNorthie]

Yes, that's it. Some of the people were so desperate and scared they actually paid back money they knew full well had never been stolen in the first place. Lost homes, broken families, some lives lost.

A travesty of administrative deafness and cover up.

It was easier to jump to conclusions and destroy innocent lives than to do due diligence and complete a real audit. While some lazy bureaucrat patted himself on the back and sought public adoration for catching this "Fraud Ring". I wonder what amount of compensation that they think is adequate to the families that lost their loved one, after they were driven to suicide?? It is infuriating and very tragic for the families.

 

[MaryJanet]

It was easier to jump to conclusions and destroy innocent lives than to do due diligence and complete a real audit. While some lazy bureaucrat patted himself on the back and sought public adoration for catching this "Fraud Ring". I wonder what amount of compensation that they think is adequate to the families that lost their loved one, after they were driven to suicide?? It is infuriating and very tragic for the families.

Actually it was an information system that got it wrong. The post office had been told the software was correct.

It wasn't.

Post masters organised themselves and got some action out of the post office.

The post office's own auditor told them the software was wrong.

The post office started covering up.

There's more to it than I've written here. Loads of info if you search for UK post office scandal.

 

[L-plate chicken mum]

I’ve read an article about this awful business and Alan Bates perseverance .

We can in the NL! They started broadcasting on 2/21. Its on my bucket list for the upcoming week.
View attachment 3761903

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office/episodes/
Scandalous that it’s taken 20 years of people’s lives, sometimes literally taken their lives & is still causing misery. Worse that it took a tv drama to really put a rocket up the politicians to get it sorted (although they tried to deny that)

 

[BDutch]

I recall you mentioning you had been to London before, twice I think. Have you been anywhere out of London?

I have been to London twice as a teenager.

A few years later I made a bicycle tour with a friend. From the south of the Netherlands, to Duinkerken in Belgium and started in England in Dover, along the South coast to Brighton and Hastings, up to the New Forest National park near Portsmouth, to Winchester and back to Dover and the continent again.

With my family we visited Canterbury, London and Folkestone in 2015.

 

[Perris]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office/episodes/
Scandalous that it’s taken 20 years of people’s lives, sometimes literally taken their lives & is still causing misery. Worse that it took a tv drama to really put a rocket up the politicians to get it sorted (although they tried to deny that)

as it happens, it's in the news this morning
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...-brits-appearance-to-urge-faster-compensation

 

[Perris]

I hear quite often people saying that you need to place new eggs under a broody when she commits to sitting, because the embryos in the old eggs she periodically sat on will have died

The double frequency you used here ('often', 'people') made me wonder if this is local folk wisdom/ old timers' tales / [insert various other labels for this category] rather than something you happened across on the internet. You Greeks have been raising chickens since at least the 7th century BC, and Aristotle had nailed a lot of the incubation story (with outstanding observational skills) already in the 4th century BC, so I've been digging a bit, and guess what? I really think they may be onto something.

Our received wisdom is that incubation does not begin until the end of the egg-laying period to ensure synchronous hatching of the clutch of eggs. But there's a problem with this.

When a hen goes to lay the second egg in the clutch, she is unavoidably starting to incubate the first egg laid. I have read nothing to date (and I've read a lot ) to indicate that there is some physical or biological mechanism in the egg that can distinguish between this short incubation period and incubation proper. After dropping the second egg and sitting on it (and egg 1) till the bloom's dried, she stops sitting/incubating, and goes about her daily business, till she comes back the next day to lay the third one, and thereby temporarily incubates egg 1 again, and now egg 2 as well. And so it repeats until she deems the clutch complete, by which time egg 1 might have been partially incubated say 6, or 9, or 12 times. I think it quite possible that the earliest laid eggs in the clutch start to develop and then die early through this stop-start process of growing the clutch. It would be relatively trivial to test this hypothesis.

Infertility/early embryo mortality is an active new research area, but no-one I've read so far has suggested what I've just said as a potential mechanism. They do however identify lots of other things that may be impacting fertility/early mortality rates. The interested might want to see e.g. Hemmings N, Evans S. 2020 Unhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations. Biol. Lett. 16:20190763. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0763 (open access)

Abstract: "Prenatal mortality is typically overlooked in population studies, which biases evolutionary inference by confounding selection and inheritance. Birds represent an opportunity to include this ‘invisible fraction’ if each egg contains a zygote, but whether hatching failure is caused by fertilization failure versus prenatal mortality is largely unknown. We quantified fertilization failure rates in two bird species that are popular systems for studying evolutionary dynamics and found that overwhelming majorities (99.9%) of laid eggs were fertilized. These systems thus present opportunities to eliminate the invisible fraction from life-history data."

and/or see Assersohn, K., Marshall, A.F., Morland, F. et al. (2 more authors) (2021) Why do eggs fail? Causes of hatching failure in threatened populations and consequences for conservation. Animal Conservation, 24 (4). pp. 540-551. ISSN 1367-9430 Open access version here: White Rose Research Online https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/174139/

From the Introduction: "However, the drivers of hatching failure are complex and poorly understood. In this review, we highlight the key factors associated with high levels of hatching failure beyond the impacts of predation, damage, desertion and exploitation. We then explore the underlying reproductive problems linked to hatching failure and how these are influenced by ecological and behavioural factors. We argue that a lack of understanding of the mechanistic basis of hatching failure can lead to flawed conclusions about how and why it occurs, with important implications for our understanding of avian ecology and conservation."

 

[kcan2]

Hen tax

If you were to put antennas atop each of those nest boxes, you'd have three of the best tv sets to be had! The Egg Laying Station is a good channel in that commercials are kept to a minimum

 

[fluffycrow]

The double frequency you used here ('often', 'people') made me wonder if this is local folk wisdom/ old timers' tales / [insert various other labels for this category] rather than something you happened across on the internet. You Greeks have been raising chickens since at least the 7th century BC, and Aristotle had nailed a lot of the incubation story (with outstanding observational skills) already in the 4th century BC, so I've been digging a bit, and guess what? I really think they may be onto something.

Our received wisdom is that incubation does not begin until the end of the egg-laying period to ensure synchronous hatching of the clutch of eggs. But there's a problem with this.

When a hen goes to lay the second egg in the clutch, she is unavoidably starting to incubate the first egg laid. I have read nothing to date (and I've read a lot ) to indicate that there is some physical or biological mechanism in the egg that can distinguish between this short incubation period and incubation proper. After dropping the second egg and sitting on it (and egg 1) till the bloom's dried, she stops sitting/incubating, and goes about her daily business, till she comes back the next day to lay the third one, and thereby temporarily incubates egg 1 again, and now egg 2 as well. And so it repeats until she deems the clutch complete, by which time egg 1 might have been partially incubated say 6, or 9, or 12 times. I think it quite possible that the earliest laid eggs in the clutch start to develop and then die early through this stop-start process of growing the clutch. It would be relatively trivial to test this hypothesis.

Infertility/early embryo mortality is an active new research area, but no-one I've read so far has suggested what I've just said as a potential mechanism. They do however identify lots of other things that may be impacting fertility/early mortality rates. The interested might want to see e.g. Hemmings N, Evans S. 2020 Unhatched eggs represent the invisible fraction in two wild bird populations. Biol. Lett. 16:20190763. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0763 (open access)

Abstract: "Prenatal mortality is typically overlooked in population studies, which biases evolutionary inference by confounding selection and inheritance. Birds represent an opportunity to include this ‘invisible fraction’ if each egg contains a zygote, but whether hatching failure is caused by fertilization failure versus prenatal mortality is largely unknown. We quantified fertilization failure rates in two bird species that are popular systems for studying evolutionary dynamics and found that overwhelming majorities (99.9%) of laid eggs were fertilized. These systems thus present opportunities to eliminate the invisible fraction from life-history data."

and/or see Assersohn, K., Marshall, A.F., Morland, F. et al. (2 more authors) (2021) Why do eggs fail? Causes of hatching failure in threatened populations and consequences for conservation. Animal Conservation, 24 (4). pp. 540-551. ISSN 1367-9430 Open access version here: White Rose Research Online https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/174139/

From the Introduction: "However, the drivers of hatching failure are complex and poorly understood. In this review, we highlight the key factors associated with high levels of hatching failure beyond the impacts of predation, damage, desertion and exploitation. We then explore the underlying reproductive problems linked to hatching failure and how these are influenced by ecological and behavioural factors. We argue that a lack of understanding of the mechanistic basis of hatching failure can lead to flawed conclusions about how and why it occurs, with important implications for our understanding of avian ecology and conservation."

Actually, my rant was prompted by something I read online. What you wrote got me thinking, and I think you're definitely onto something. Historically, the people in the south of Greece would not interfere with the brooding and raising stage of a hen's life at all. Since they were free ranging on great stretches of land, one morning they'd simply find one of their hens missing, and around 21 day later they'd see her come back with chicks. As for the northern people, the environment was more controlled. I do not know as many stories about their ways of chicken keeping, but I'm quite certain I've heard them say that whenever they found a brooding hen, they'd move her to their desired location and set her up with some new eggs. From the present day "oldies", about the same follows. There has been a slight shift towards preferring the method of the Northerners, though. The Albanian population in Greece definitely places new eggs under the hen, when they discover her brooding. I personally know a lot of people who follow this strategy. That said, I can't say the purpose of this is to avoid the first eggs dying off due to on and off brooding, since a lot of the people who take the old eggs and give the new do it because they don't have a male of their own, or they want something else hatched. That is to say, that I do not know if the reasoning behind this "growing" trend is something more complex, or more superficial, as is wanting to hatch this year's meat supply. Like you, I have never read about a mechanism that prevents the embryo from developing while the female continues laying the rest of her clutch. The research papers you quoted (I'll have to go through those as well) show some complcompelling evidence, that at the very minimum, reasons related to hatching failure, and thus strategies to a successful hatch are largely unknown, and that most of the talk around this topic is merely speculative. The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about hatching failure in relation to early development, is incubators. Most people who gather eggs for machine incubation will do so daily, gradually building the number of eggs they want, until placing them all in the machine at the same time. If incubating the first eggs while laying the rest was a problem that would lead to the first eggs dying off, wouldn't we notice a higher percentage of successful hatches with using incubators? To my knowledge, the hatch rates are pretty much identical. I'll be the first to admit that this train of thought is very anecdotal. As the research papers proved, it seems the more one reads into this topic, the more likely one is to understand that this subject is so "uncharted", that most of this is speculative. What we can be sure of, in my opinion, is that it is not a single piece of the puzzle that's missing, otherwise it would have been easier to spot

 

[fuzzi]

If you were to put antennas atop each of those nest boxes, you'd have three of the best tv sets to be had! The Egg Laying Station is a good channel in that commercials are kept to a minimum

But there are breaks in the programs when Rahab evicts whoever is in HER box.

 

[notabitail]

If you were to put antennas atop each of those nest boxes, you'd have three of the best tv sets to be had! The Egg Laying Station is a good channel in that commercials are kept to a minimum

Batty Ol' Hens Broody Tincture will start advertising there then.