Unusual space ?

[Ridgerunner]

I think how you quarantine is important. Just bringing birds in from a stable flock and keeping them separate is pretty worthless in my opinion. You can treat them for mites, lice and worms if you want, but those are more inconvenient things, not life threatening. What you are really worried about is the diseases that will wipe out your flock. If they are coming from a situation where they have been exposed to other birds, then it is different and a quarantine is probably a pretty good idea. But if they have been in a stable situation with no exposure to other chickens, then the flock can have a disease that it has developed an immunity to but can infect other chickens. That will not show up in a quarantine.

It is possible that either flock has a disease that will infect the other. Either flock, not just the incoming flock. I'll use cocci as an easy example but there are others. To me, the effective, efficient way to quarantine is to take a bird or two from each flock and put them together in isolation. You only put one or two of your birds at risk instead of your entire flock and you get a much better idea disease-wise of what will happen when you combine the two flocks.

I think quarantine is a very valuable tool but if it is not used correctly, it is not very useful.

 

[WoodlandWoman]

It must be hard to get so much negative feedback on something you really want to do. I'm sure part of it is wanting more chickens and a lot of it is wanting to help your friend.

When considering something like this, it's always good to ask yourself what your risks are and what you are going to do if things go horribly wrong. Are you willing to risk losing chickens to disease? Are you willing to risk chickens to fighting and cannibalism? Can you treat or cull them if the stress of the situation causes a disease to break out? Do you have a back-up plan if you go out to the coop and it's a bloody mess from fighting? Everyone makes their own choices when it comes to risk management. Just make sure you think about the worst case scenario and are prepared to deal with it. Maybe these are unusually docile chickens and there's a small chance you would be lucky. Just make sure you are prepared if you aren't unusually lucky.

If you want more chickens, that's something you could do more safely with some planning and preparation. If you mainly want to help your friend find a new place for the chickens, you could post in the buy/sell/trade section or mention it in the thread for your state, where people chit chat. Those might be options for you to help, if that was your main motivation.

Good luck with what ever you decide to do.