(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
About Those Chickens [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-18
There’s a fellow out there offering chickens for rent. The offer includes a coop.
I’m actually considering it. My landlady didn’t say I couldn’t keep chickens, and eggs are absurdly expensive these days.
I should know better.
In 2006, my sister bought the farm. In 2007, she bought chickens for her farm.
In the spring, feed stores offer baby chicks for sale. My sister and her wife brought theirs home, and kept them in the bathtub, until they were big enough to go out back and live in the coop.
They were well supplied with eggs. At one point, they sent a friend off with nine dozen. But, raising chickens is an adventure, and not always the good kind.
For starters there are roosters. People who sell chicks try to sort out the males, but they don’t always succeed. Roosters happen. At one point, my sister and her wife had seven of them. (They talked about slaughtering and eating them, but the roosters all had names.)
Roosters do, indeed crow at sunrise. Sunrise is when roosters start crowing. They continue for the rest of the day, every now and then, to let everyone know there’s a rooster on the premises.
Go on Youtube, and you can see the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, reading the lesson on Peter and the Cock, while his rooster, Russel Crow, provides sound effects.
If there is more than one rooster, the crowing becomes competitive. I think the object is to see who can cock a doodle doo the loudest.
For this reason, some communities will allow residents to keep chickens, but not roosters.
You will still get eggs, if there are no roosters. You just won’t get as many and they won’t be as large.
They also won’t hatch.
My sister and her wife came home from vacation and found one of their hens sitting on a clutch of eggs on one of their porch chairs.
That’s another thing about chickens; they don’t stay put.
My sister’s chickens had a very nice pen. But they liked to get out and see what else there was. One of them found her way through the dog door into the kitchen. She was showing the other chickens how to get in when my sister found her.
If you have chickens they may, sometimes, decide to go visit the neighbors. My local Nextdoor group occasionally has someone posting about some stray chickens that have wandered into their yard.
If the eggs are fertile, the chicken will lay them in a suitable location and sit on them until they hatch.
If they aren’t, they’ll lay them anywhere and walk away. It is not pleasant to step on an egg that has been sitting in the sun for four or five days.
If my sister’s dog, Snickers, ate a stray egg, no one minded.
Snickerdoodle the schnoodle, is an adorable ball of white fluff, with large, soulful brown eyes, who likes to mangle poultry.
Unlike Christi Noem’s unfortunate pup, he has enjoyed a full and happy life, chewing shoes, eating underwear, and occasionally dismembering a chicken.
Snickers wasn’t the only threat to my sister’s poultry. There was a fox and a bobcat, who would stop by and help themselves to a hen, now and again.
My sister’s solution was Lily, a Great Pyrenees dog. Great Pyrenees were bred to be farm dogs. If anything threatened the chickens, Lily would chase them away, barking furiously.
When she did this, their neighbor, Grampy Crampypants, who lived 300 yards away, would call the sheriff and complain about the barking dog.
Chickens aren’t what you’d call careful about where they relieve themselves. Their coop will need cleaning, and so will the eggs.
When visiting my sister, I always had to clean the chicken poo off the eggs before I used them.
There are egg washers, but once washed, the eggs don’t last as long.
All this goes a long way towards explaining why my sister no longer has chickens and why I won’t be getting any, even though I could rent them, with a coop.
If you have chickens, you won’t be paying $5.95 for a dozen eggs and your life will never be dull. But it may not be worth the trouble and effort.
Check your community regulations. Consider what kind of time and leisure you have, and if you are willing to do the work, or know someone who is.
Then maybe rent your chickens, and the coop, until you’re sure you can live with poultry.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/18/2304619/-About-Those-Chickens?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
