should i let my chickens die naturally?

[writerskramp]

Euthanizing to the back of the head can sometimes be a mistake.. I've done it. Dog to chicken.. What if...? Had I known what I do now, I may have been able to save them.. or maybe just a little too trigger happy. Sometimes patience is the best medicine, just wait it out..

 

[pennybristow29]

yes but eating the apple and throwing the core in the garbage destroys the potential life of all those seeds. So it does hurt the plant's ability to reproduce.

Ok, this is a bit of crazy talk. The rabbits in my backyard have no ethical problem with stealing the vegetables in my garden or just tearing it apart for sport. The cabbage cutworms don’t care either. We all have to eat something or we will die. Whatever you choose to consume, being thankful is the first step. Food decisions are a luxury for those who have enough to eat.

 

[Aapomp831]

I think they were trying to make the point that it's hypocritical to say it's cruel to eat animals but fine to eat plants - the implication being we can eat both, not neither.

Also, who are we to say that plants don't have feelings or consciousness? We know some plants react to having their leaves eaten by releasing chemicals that make their leaves taste bad or even poisonous to deter insects from attacking them. That's clearly a will to live. Recent studies have established that some plants also communicate with others - even those of other species - through hormonal signaling; for example, some will react to that insect attack by releasing a hormone that warns other plants nearby, even those of other species, so that they can preemptively launch their own defenses. That's more pro-social behavior than many animals exhibit. And some trees have been observed to be capturing extra nurtients from the soil and funneling it towards their own offspring nearby. That's more parental care than many animals demonstrate.

Just saying, it's just as anthropocentric to say that plants don't have consciousness as it is to say that animals don't feel pain.

Evolution is amazing. I agree. But I’m not going to Honey I Shrunk the Kids across my lawn everyday. This is a pointless discussion.

 

[Appalachickens]

That's why all my food waste goes either to my chickens or, if it's unfit for them, to the compost. It causes me physical pain to put food waste in the trash, eg when on vacation or at someone else's house. I would actually like to take it even farther; once I have my own land, I plan to build a composting toilet so that the organic matter I consume doesn't go to waste in a septic tank or sewer. Talk about waste. All that fertility that's been extracted from our soils gets locked up in humanure, and instead of returning it to the ground, most of it is flushed out to sea where it causes harmful algal blooms and dead zones.

But to be fair, speaking as a former vegetarian, I never believed that it was morally wrong to eat animals. I just wasn't comfortable with it because I liked animals and was grossed out by the thought of eating them. Being a vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean you're making a statement about the morality of eating meat. I also felt - and still do - that if you're not comfortable with the idea of butchering an animal, or even seeing the animal you're going to eat while it's alive without having a lot of cognitive dissonance, then you probably shouldn't be eating it. Most people don't have that problem with plants. The hypocrisy comes when you start distancing yourself from the source of your food. I know people who eat a ton of meat but don't want to think about the fact that it came from some cute animal.

Personally, I now eat meat but focus more on only consuming animals that were either caught in the wild (mainly fish) or raised on a real farm on pasture and without antibiotics or hormones (either by me or from a local farm where we get all our purchased meat from). I generally don't get meat at restaurants, unless I have a good idea of where they're getting it from. I think what's more important than whether or not you eat meat, is how the animals you eat are treated while they're alive. The only meat I have a moral problem with is the kind that comes from CAFOs or anywhere else where animals are basically tortured and kept in deplorable concentration camp-like conditions. But again, that only happens because people are so disconnected from their food.

I did a pescatarian diet for about 20 years while I was practicing Buddhism. But my son is a hunter and it forced me to think a lot about my reasons for that. Growing up on a small farm, I had to help butcher cows and I always felt like they at least got a good life before they became meat. Same for squirrels or deer that are hunted for their meat. I realized my issues had more to do with my dismay about commercial farming practices and the horror of the lives of cows on CAFOs and de-beaked chickens in tiny cages. I am now etchially comfortable with eating meat from humanely raised animals and buy from local farms. A farmer recently commented to me that the cows only had one bad day in their life. I told that to my son and he said that for cows on CAFOs, that day was probably the best day of their lives. That’s what I can’t live with - knowingly participating in commercial farming that keeps animals in abject misery. So when we get the house built andI can start raising chickens, I am comfortable with the idea of treating them well and then killing them for their meat.

 

[ZebraBus]

Sorry, do you have a hen who is suffering? I would keep mine and let them pass naturally if nothing is going wrong and they’re just old. If there’s nothing you can do like one of my girls last year had an injury that I couldn’t do anything for and the best solution is humane euthanasia but if they’re just not laying and have a will to live than leave them be.

Yep! My husband and I are apparently running an Old Folks Hen Home lol. We usually have 3-6 hens for eggs just for us, but nature has a way of culling them naturally; one knocked herself out running into a pole and died, one ate birdseed that fell from the wild bird feeder and got seed-bound (I didn't know that was even possible), one went broody for 45 straight days, came out of it for 2 weeks then went broody for 48 days and died on the nest. We tried hand-feeding her, breaking the broodiness, followed tutorials, contacted consultants... she just broodied herself to death, but died doing what she thought she was meant to do. We currently have 4 laying and getting waaaay too many eggs for just the 2 of us so all of our family members and neighbors are enjoying the excess. Bottom line, nature has been handling our hen deaths, we have not had to cull (yet), and will cross that bridge when we come to it.

 

[Tom Kathleen]

how did you euthanize it? we have to use the axe due to no vets see birds here.

 

[Araucana Nest]

Mercy killing is killing.. who is to say those final moments are not relished by the living.. you can't ask them after they're dead..

I was speaking of there being only agony for the animal. I had a pig, many years ago, who stuck her head through the fence and stray pitbull dogs tore her head up beyond repair. No idea how long she had been screaming, when I got home from work. Her jaw was dropped open due to bites and tears... unrecognizable... just to clarify what I said above, not to beleaguer the thread .

 

[Brooks_]

how did you euthanize it? we have to use the axe due to no vets see birds here.

I'd imagine any vet could do it. I use a broomstick.

 

[writerskramp]

I was speaking of there being only agony for the animal. I had a pig, many years ago, who stuck her head through the fence and stray pitbull dogs tore her head up beyond repair. No idea how long she had been screaming, when I got home from work. Her jaw was dropped open due to bites and tears... unrecognizable... just to clarify what I said above, not to beleaguer the thread .

Different issue..

 

[bill3607]

Mercy killing is killing.. who is to say those final moments are not relished by the living.. you can't ask them after they're dead..

No, but you can while they are going through it a lot of times. I am speaking of people of course. I have been with a few people while they died and not too many of them enjoyed the process of reaching the final event. That process can be quite unpleasant to say the least. That is why we now have hospice care which is basically trying to give as much comfort as possible. At the end they basically drug you up and cut off all nutrition to speed it up and let you go in as little discomfort and awareness as possible.
There is a very real thing called suffering and it happens in animals as well as humans.