Their rato is 2:1 (intake two times what they weigh at slaughter roughly)> You wouldn't get that out of a DP bird.. Also the DP roosters have to be slow cooked.
If when you say 'DP' you mean Dual Purpose, then you've got a bad strain. Dual Purpose is not supposed to mean a layer breed you cull and eat, it's supposed to mean a breed that is both good laying and good eating.
I select my breeders for DP usage and only 3-year-old-and-older purebred-crossed roosters were ever tough enough to need slow cooking. A little bit of silkie genes mixed throughout the large fowl genes makes them tender at any age, no matter the gender. Also makes them easy fleshing, incredibly feed efficient, great foragers, hardy, etc.
But I do observe that the silkies people have in America seem more often than not a complete contradiction of everything I just associated with my silkie mongrels, and I accept that meaties in America may also be a complete contradiction of everything we condemn them for around here. Nobody I know ever keeps meaties a second time.
Mongrels beat the feed conversion ratios of all layer and meaty breeds I have any experience with, though I don't have experience with them all. But I'm not interested at this point in purebreds. Too inbred on average, round here. I have not been impressed with a single purebred I've ever had, nor their first or second crosses.
Speaking of conversing with our chickens, Bob has taken up a new hobby: getting the roosters to talk to him. For a man who didn't want me to have any ("they're too noisy and mean"), he has certainly come a long way. The other night when I came home, he followed me out to the coop (unusual) and said, "Watch this!" He buck-buck-bagawed at the Silkie cock, who instantly repeated it back to him. Later he went out to the other runs with me, where the Fayoumis did the same thing. The Fayoumi boys are happy to crow about anything, and I've been waiting for him to tell me they should go because they're too noisy, and here he was encouraging them to crow! He likes how male they look too, which again amazes me. hu.gif I'll take it
NOOO! ... lol, sorry, but I strongly advise against this, you will likely end up with hysterical screamers making endless noise. It's one thing to calmly communicate their 'happy noises', but repeating the alarm calls can get out of control.
Once you get a chook to make loud noise in response to human voices, it escalates, I have had to cull both turkeys and chickens for becoming habitually hysterical. My little siblings liked to 'bok-bagark' at chooks and 'gobbly-bobble' and the turkey toms, and in short order I had chooks that began screaming at the slightest sound of a human voice being raised above a whisper, when they'd always been fine with even shouting; with the turkey toms you could not have a normal conversation within hearing range of them, because they would gobble NON STOP. The paddock and yard became deafening day in, day out, until I culled the birds over-reacting.
Before, 'bok-bagarking' signalled either an egg being laid (rarely made for that) or predators attacking. Before, gobbling only occurred when a noise above average decibels was made. It became insane in short order. Some chooks like to keep the whole flock screaming, and once it's trained to do so, they will set it off every time it settles. You can have non stop noise all day every day, anxious chickens, and aggressive turkeys. Bad! (Once a turkey tom or chooks perceives you're making a reply to its noise, it will often reply in kind; it's not uncommon, and in the case of a tom they will likely then view you as a tom).
The noise your husband is provoking them to make is a compulsive reaction for some chooks, and once you get the noisy ones to go off like that, they can just start setting the whole flock off, over, and over, and over, again, until culled. I have found the only way to stop them once the behaviour is ingrained is to kill them. Silkie/banty mixes and layers were the worst for making raucous, endless 'panic' noises over nothing whatsoever.
These high quality ones do not take well to candling. I've had 100% fertility and still ended up with 50% hatched. I still can't figure out why, but candling less seems to help them get to term.
Makes me wonder how they can be 'high quality' --- looks alone do not equal high quality in my book. But I have an idea why they might have such high mortality: weak membrane structures in the eggs. Maybe what other eggs cope with is fatal to them because they can't take the usual movements an egg experiences when brooded, since a brooding hen also turns the eggs as she gets on and off the nest and shifts.
. I know it comes with free ranging but it still makes me sad.
