Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Perris]

Sully has started laying; a nice little brown egg

she was literally standing behind Uppsala in a nest box, which U didn't seem to mind, but just carried on regardless
Sully and Tintern are a couple; they bathed together afterwards

Aberglasny is also being mated now, so I think she's not far behind.

 

[BDutch]

Sully has started laying; a nice little brown egg

Congrats!

Not bad for a young bantam Amrock!

 

[Molpet]

What does this mean??????

 

[MROO]

View attachment 4026263

Now that's a crazy marketing ploy if ever I've seen one! I wonder how long it takes to realize that their back is "hospital gown cold?" Folding it would be a nightmare - worse than a fitted bed-sheet! And pockets in a blanket? Wouldn't a warm, fuzzy robe make more sense? I wonder how many people got them for Christmas ... and how long it'll take them to show up, discarded, in the thrift shops? Zheesh!

 

[Shadrach]

I too am counting the days, but as someone who has lived with both, I can confidently say that English cold is colder than East Coast US cold (NJ specifically) whatever the thermometer says.
I think it is the damp that does it. Maybe also the lack of sunshine. English cold just gets in your bones somehow!

I've heard a lot of people who have coped with minus degrees winter temperatures for weeks in their home country say they've never been so cold as they've been in England.

 

[Shadrach]

The approach of @Beekissed is very different from the one @Shadrach advices.
Beekissed advices the owner to take the dominant role. Shadrach advices to give the food to the rooster and not to the hens. Bc it’s the rooster who should give the food to the ladies.

Just to be clear...
What I prefer is to come to a working relationship with the roosters. All that domination business seems like a lot of hard work and has some questionable motivations based around gender, sex and power. One either is or one isn't respected in any creatures eyes and beating them with sticks and demonstarting how much more powerfull one is isn't likely to give a warm and loving relationship in the long run.
The feeding the rooster before the hens, roughly, is just one of the tools one can use to help solve those difficult rooster problems. There are other tools that don't require carrying a stick or letting the rooster think you're having sex with him because one has pinned him to the ground, or beating the crap out of him.
Maybe I've been lucky but then again so have a number of people on this forum who have gone the cooperation route rather than the domination route. Perhaps there are some cultural elements in this.

 

[Shadrach]

I don't do regular hands-on health checks.

I became more hands on as time went by. One of the things Victoria Roberts (Vet and some) stresses is the importance of being able to handle a bird. Many other keepers that I've known also rank highly being able to examine the bird in daylight and in order to do this one needs to be able to catch it.
This doesn't mean one has to end up with a lap chicken.

 

[Perris]

I managed to get a photo of Killay's lost spur site too today; it seems to have healed up fine.

I wonder if it will grow back, as there is not even a nub there now.

 

[Shadrach]

We have a saying “ There is more than one road that leads to Rome” . There must a dozen in how we people handle roosters. And even more in how we care for our flocks.

I read something like the above a lot on this forum. There are dozens of ways to get a nail into a piece of wood but time and experience has proven using a hammer works well. It's the same with chickens, there is a right way and a wrong way for many of the things that crop up in chicken care as there is for most activities.

 

[Perris]

I became more hands on as time went by. One of the things Victoria Roberts (Vet and some) stresses is the importance of being able to handle a bird. Many other keepers that I've known also rank highly being able to examine the bird in daylight and in order to do this one needs to be able to catch it.
This doesn't mean one has to end up with a lap chicken.

Roberts has a fairly commercial approach to chicken keeping, and highlights handling for its potential to signal that a bird is under- or over- weight, which in turn may be a sign of disease, about which she was writing in the book to which I think you're referring (Diseases of free range poultry). I don't think that end justifies that means. I prefer to evaluate the health of a bird by watching it carefully going about its normal business in its normal environment, and especially in motion. From that I know which birds are eating and which are only pretending, which are bright eyed and bushy tailed and which are feeling under the weather, and so on. Of course if any are really sick or injured, then they may need a hands-on approach, and I have been able to catch them in such circumstances. You may remember the episodes with Sven and Obelix after the fox attack in 2020, or Chirk in 2023.

But in my experience most chicken health issues are ephemeral, and if noticed, are often best ignored; historically interventions by me have been, I think, neutral or detrimental to the outcome, rather than beneficial, making a trivial thing more serious, or weakening the bird through treatment for an ailment that it may or may not have had. We want to help and like to think we are, and many no doubt get satisfaction from having done *something*. But it's not clear to me from the pages of BYC that keepers are actually helping most of the time, when they intervene and treat what they think is a sick chicken, with something more or less appropriate, for what they think might be the problem. The intentions are good, but that doesn't guarantee good actions or outcomes. And in the worst cases, prolonging life is sometimes a euphemism for prolonging death.

If one intends to show a bird, then I see the need for habituating the bird to handling, and I understand how that in turn gets rated by others of the same inclination (but that doesn't include me).