Thanks so much for this information, I didn’t know any of this!What most people don't know is, that ~100-130 years ago chicken eggs were a rare delicacy and eating duck-eggs was the standard. That is the time when the Dutch Hook-Bill ducks were cleaning the shipping channels in the Netherlands by the thousands and stories like "Jemima Puddle-Duck" were born.
Then unfortunately for the ducks and the chickens some greed capitalist discovered that you can stuff five chickens into a 1 cubic-yard wire cage, feed them on one side, let their poop fall through the wire and the eggs roll out at the other side and the industrial »egg-farm« was born. Suddenly chicken eggs became dirt cheap and there was no need to keep ducks anymore…
Compared to chickens, keeping ducks for eggs has three real advantages:
- Ducks start to lay eggs much earlier than chickens
- Many duck-breed simply "out-lay" a lot of chicken-breeds, the infamous Khaki Campbell lays over 300 eggs per year, almost one egg per day. Only a few industrial chicken-breeds come close to those numbers.
- Duck eggs are about 1½ times the size of chicken eggs
SadlyFortunately one cannot stuff five ducks into a wire cage… they would simply refuse to live like that and starve themselves to death, so ducks cannot be used for industrial egg production.
And for the »Eeew! Duck eggs! They taste awful!« people: Your taste buds are so used to those cheap, watery chicken eggs from the super-markets, coming from poor hens that never see daylight or green grass and are fed with industrial waste… that any egg from any bird that lives happy in somebodies backyard would taste »Eeeew!« to you. Have fun with your peanut allergy!
Sorry for the rant, my neighbor got some rescued battery-chickens today, they looked so sad, so beaten up
I looked for rescue chickens but there’s not much of that around here. People don’t really care, I hitch is sad. I hope your friend and the new birds do fine and that all is well. Poor girls.
Good morning IM, have a great day
