You are just going to use this fancy education to get an edge in the world of illegal cock fighting aren’t you?
Why did you choose chickens as a specialty? I’m not trying to make fun, I really am curious…
Would you consider keeping chickens as pets?
Did anybody else envision a half-human, half-Rhode Island Red mutant?
Ah, I perceive that you are unfamiliar with the gustatory delight known as the “capon”. 
Testosterone creates muscle mass and strength, so the meat from castrated male animals is notably tender. And thus, we eat the steer and not the bull; the wether and not the ram; the barrow and not the boar hog.
And if you castrate a cockerel, not only does he grow up to have tender flesh, but he also gets bigger than he would have if he were wasting calories strutting around picking fights with anything that moves.
And since castrated male animals tend to put on fat instead of muscle (think of fat eunuchs in harems), they are quite fatty.
So you end up with a big, tender, flavorful, juicy roasting chicken.
People like this specialize in raising capons. And there’s money in it; this 6 to 8 lb. smoked capon retails for $48.50 plus shipping. That’s roughly $8 a pound–for chicken.
So that was why I said you’d be popular with all your free-range-chicken-raising gourmet friends–you can go out to their place and magically create $8 a pound capons for them.
I was thinking of Mark McKinney’s Chicken Lady.
Doing the chicken dance?
A slightly more reliable book says 6000 B.C. The Field Guide to Chickens, by Pam Percy
Neat pics. Thanks!
Which came first, the course of study or the user name??
They can be happy in groups of near any size. The females seem quite content on their own, but if you have a male, especially more than one male, then you need enough females around that the males can form little harems and not feel like they have to fight each other all the time for sexual privileges. And enough space, as well. Also, you’ll need to pick up all the eggs religiously and refrigerate them, or you’ll have more chickens than you want.
The other trick is not importing new birds into a largish group of established birds abruptly. The phrase “pecking order” is literal. They beat on each other to decide who gets first choice at food, the best nest spot, etc. Once they’ve decided who is socially situated above who, they mostly leave each other alone. If you bring in a new bird, that whole social order has to be reset. If you bring one bird into a group of 12 established birds, the new bird is going to have its ass handed to it by the others. It’s not uncommon for birds to kill each other this way.
Similarly, feeding eggs you don’t want back to the birds by smashing the egg on the ground may be quick and effective, but is not recommended. Every now and then, you’ll get a bird who develops a taste for eggs, and will go after other hen’s eggs, even while they are in the midst of laying them. Then the aggressor gets a penchant for attaching other hens, and you end up with a bunch of birds who are vent pecked to death.
They’re gruesome little beasties.
Yeah, pretty easily. They even have different noises depending on how old they are and if they are in the middle of laying an egg.
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t heard of him before. Do you know what breed of Leghorn he developed? I can’t find anything specific enough.
The breeds of laying hens we have today are little more than feathers on an oviduct and ovary.
Here’s a schematic of the oviduct and here’s a picture of a real one with a finished egg at the end
Total transit time: about 24 hours.
Process:
- One egg follicle (one egg yolk) is ovulated off of the ovary, just like they do in people, except bigger. Chickens, like all birds that I know of, only have one ovary and oviduct.
- The follicle is caught by the open end of the oviduct, called the infundibulum. There is a sperm storage site here, and the follicle can be fertilized at this time if sperm are present.
- The follicle travels down the oviduct, getting the remaining packaging of the finished egg added as it goes. First the albumen, or egg white, then the shell membrane.
- The shell is added in the shell gland, roughly equivalent to the mammalian uterus. If the bird makes colored eggs, then pigment is added to the calcium matrix here.
- Exit. Tricky.
Laying eggs is amazingly taxing on the bird’s biology. Before they start laying eggs, hens have deposits of yellow coloring in their legs, beaks, and around their vents. They get the coloring from their food. When they go into lay, the pigment is leached out from these areas and put into the yolks to make them yellow. A white bird in lay will look down right pallid. Their dietary intake of calcium needs to be carefully monitored or the bird’s bones will become very brittle. Their ovary, with its dozens of egg yolks hanging off, and oviduct swell and make up a significant portion of the bird’s body weight.
Fun facts:
A lot of animal welfare groups are against forces molting in birds because, they argue, the bird’s body weight drops precipitously when the bird comes out of egg production. This is true, but the reason their weight drops is because all that oviduct and ovary goes quiescent and involutes. This would happen during a natural molt or a forced molt, so it’s not a good measure of any sort of mistreatment to the birds.
Because chickens can take any sort of caratenoid and use it to color their egg yolks, you can change the color of the yolks by what you feed the chickens. Here in California, consumers like really bright yellow yolks, so many of the chickens are feed marigold flowers in their rations.
A professor of mine claims to give his birds red, green, and blue caratenoids (or something chemically similar) to make fancy colored yolks in his eggs for Easter.
Chickens can be mean little dinosaurs when they want to. Apparently, the rabbit’s playtime upset them somehow. Damned entertaining.
Weird legislative fact: In California, rabbits are legally considered a kind of poultry. All the rules for taking chickens to market apply to rabbits as well.
Is it pretty much all or most bird species in which the male is more brightly feathered than the female, or just the fowls?
:eek:
Ever seen an enraged guinea fowl?
:eek:
True story: When we got our first flock of half a dozen guinea fowl, a trio of the barn cats decided to stalk three of the hens. When they got within a few feet, the hens charged them, feathers puffed, wings deployed, screeching as only a battle-ready guinea fowl can screech. The cats bolted for their lives and to this day stay well away from the beady-eyed little velociraptors.
A guinea fowl’s alarm call sounds like the bastard offspring of a calliope and a machine gun.
The good news: not a lot has changed. Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens is an excellent source for the backyard poultry person.
I’d recommend getting about 6 chickens. The daily care, housing, and overall expenses would be pretty much the same for 6 chickens as for 3. The main benefit is that 6 chickens are going to go through a 50 pound bag of feed faster. In the months that it will take 3 birds to eat down that much food, all the vitamin A and E is going to degrade. That might not cause nutritional problems in birds that have a yard to run around in, but if you live in an area with regular snowfall, or any other situation that makes the birds dependent on the feed for all their nutrients, you could see problems. 6 birds will make sure the feed stays fresh. As a bonus, getting half a dozen eggs every day for the sunny months of the year will make you very popular with your new neighbors.
Also, you might be interested in this design for a portable poultry house, which lets you keep your birds out of your garden and away from predators and disease-carrying wild birds, while still letting them have access to the great outdoors.
The page that link is from has lots of additional info for backyard keepers.
Vet stuff:
I (along with all the other real poultry vets I’ve talked to) highly recommend vaccinating your birds for Marek’s Disease. Make sure that you order birds from a hatchery or breeder who vaccinates them the day they hatch.
For other vaccine info, check with your local 4H or FFA leader, or the Agricultural extension office of your county or state university. If you have a private vet in the area who is board certified in poultry, all the better. A lot of vets who specialize in birds are willing to see poultry, but they tend to see more parrots than chickens, so their skills often are not as sharp.
I haven’t had many, but so far they taste the same. I image the big benefit to raising quail is that they are smaller and have a faster life cycle. You can raise them in less space, they take less feed, and any genetic fiddling you might be doing will produce results sooner. Most people pickle small eggs so that the shell is removed chemically by the vinegar. Plus, those inch high stripey babies running around are possibly the cutest thing ever .
It’s not illegal everywhere. 
It’s a fairly neglected specialty in veterinary medicine. Most folks go into research to work on the ever changing Avian Influenza or other diseases. Some work with the large poultry production companies, like Foster Farms and Tyson. Still others work on education in under-privileged places whose economies an populations could really benefit from modern agriculture practices. A few do the private practice thing and treat people’s pet chickens.
I, personally, like the cultural aspects of it and the outreach education. I like working with people to get the production systems as safe, economical, and humane as possible. It’s challenging and rewarding. I also like helping craft legislation that makes sense from a producer, consumer, and science perspective. It makes me really happy when everyone works together to do something that is great for the birds and great for people.
I’ve dabbled with the idea of keeping birds of my own. I finally have the space for it. Maybe someday soon.
The financial considerations are exactly why I haven’t tried them yet.
I would argue with you that castrating roosters isn’t as much of a benefit to the meat producer as it is in other species.
For one, it’s a much more invasive procedure. A rooster’s testicles are inside his body, right next to his kidneys. Removing them is tricky and more apt to result in complications and death. So the part of that extra price comes from the fact that the producer has to make up for the extra animals that died.
As for meat quantity, the current breeds of meat birds now grow so quickly and put on so much muscle mass that they have to be sent to market at 6-7 weeks of age or they risk out muscling their skeletal and cardiovascular systems. You could get birds that are just as large as the capons if you feed them carefully, but most people don’t want a giant chicken on a regular basis. Look at the trend in watermelons. The modern consumer isn’t usually trying to feed a giant family every night. As a result, the overall trend is to purchase smaller sized birds. I’ve had market owners be very upset when their birds arrive 3 or 4 days older than they thought. They say that no one buys the larger birds.
Because they go to market young, tenderness differences between a capon and a standard meat bird aren’t large.
The capon was great before the breeding modifications set in.
Most of the capons that I’ve seen were created as a niche market, to capitalize on folks who have free money to spend $50 on their homemade meal and are making an event of it. Like the folks who sell whole pigs for roasting. There just isn’t enough business to make it a growing industry.
It’s possible that someone raising conventional meat birds would want to do some capons, but the change in feeding, type of bird, and the initial cost are fairly prohibitive just to crack into a market that is well covered. Guess I’ll see