I wouldn’t assume anyone raising chickens was poor. My family once ended up with a chicken wandering our manicured suburban lawn, pecking at our neighbors’ flower beds and returning to sleep in my Cabbage Patch playhouse. No one really tells you what to do with those dyed chicks once Easter is over…
I’m enjoying the stories, but I’ve got a city-boy question.
Why do chickens just randomly lay their eggs all over the place?
I’m reminded of the Resident Evil 4 video game where they have a couple sections which have chickens wandering around and laying eggs in random places. It’s fun to see how many you can collect, but I didn’t think chickens actually did that.
Aren’t they supposed to sit on the egg so it hatches? What would be the point of plopping out an egg and walking away?
Anyone here ever raised Guinea hens? I’ve heard they’re great at eating ticks & other nasty bugs but not damaging plants too much.
If I passed a house with Guinea hens wandering it, I definitely wouldn’t think “poor.”
No, I’d think you were an actively involved parent. Chickens running loose in the yard teach children under 5 coordination, agility and a healthy respect for animal intelligence. By age 5, they learn to use sticks. 
Unless you own a “log home.” I’m sorry, but I look at a structure made of logs, even one with a million dollar mortgage, and immediately think “too poor for a double-wide.”
It’s funny how our childhood perceptions survive decades of reality. If chickens in the yard make you feel “poor”, don’t get them. If you want to confront your irrational attitudes, get some chickens (and a stick).
Only the evil chickens do that – and all chickens are evil, take my word for it. Not as evil as geese or turkeys, but evil.
In theory, according to my dear, departed, chicken-loving grandmother, they only do that when they’re stressed because the coop is overcrowded. She also claimed they only peck little girls who smack 'em with a stick because they attacked her without provocation, so I don’t believe the overcrowded coop explanation. YMMV.
Huh…don’t know why it would be. Give it another try. Or just go to the parent folder and choose pic #25 (second to last one). If none of that works, well hell, it’s a just a pic of my brother feeding some of his chickens while my daughter looks on.
I rarely read it, but I remembered reading that article (and WHERE I read it, which is a minor miracle) and thought it was an appropriate addition to this thread. That article kind of made me want to take up chicken raising, and I KNOW how stupid chickens are, and how tedious egg-collecting can be. I used to watch over my neighbors’ chickens when they went on vacation. DUMB birds. DUMBBBBB birds. But not as dumb as domestic turkeys. Turkeys take stupidity to a whole nother level.
I prefer to get my eggs in little styrofoam containers, with the shit already rinsed off of them, thankyouverymuch.
When I was a callow youth every farm, and I mean every, without exception, damn one of ‘em, had a flock of chickens. The chickens were the woman’s responsibility and the egg money and the fryer money was the woman’s own private money. The damn things were all over the house yard and out into the road all the time. Entertainment for callow youths in the Mad River Valley of Ohio was to go roaring down township roads and seeing how many chickens you could roll. They were after all just chickens – not really animals, more like mobile vegetables – and surely not sentient beings.
Chickens certainly need to be secured at night. Otherwise they will roost in the trees and the racoons and weasels and the foxes and the stray dogs and the hawks and the Great Northern Owl will clean them out. By the same token they have to be provided with laying boxes with some straw or other bedding, otherwise they will just scatter eggs all over the place. Unfertilized eggs will go bad in about a week. Of course chicken houses have to be shoveled out frequently.
For the love of God, stay clear of Guinea fowl. They are just as dirty and aggravating and willfully ignorant as any Leghorn White and a whole lot nosier. Only geese surpass Guineas as middle-of-the-night noisemakers. Anything will set them off. A general alarm could signal a prowling ‘coon or the rising of the moon – it’s all the same to them.
One of the most unpleasant memories of my childhood is the production line annual butchering of the chickens. Catcher, executioner, the guy who dunks the warm carcass in the scalding water, the guy who plucks the stinking, wet feathers, gutter, chopper-up into pieces, and the cleaner-up of the inedible remains. In the course of the day everyone took their turn at each position.
You, August, are welcome to keep all the chickens you want any way that you want. I want no part of it.
Duke, some guy named Daffy and his buddies, Donald and Howard, would like a word with you, outside.
Chickens in a coop in the bush are totally normal in Australia.
Chickens in the backyard of a suburban household mean that either the folks are from an ethnic background, or they’re high-income greenies who ethically object to purchasing coop eggs from the local supermarket.
In other words, not poor.
*I’m about to move into a new house which has a super backyard that is just fantastically designed for a few hens. After I shunt my furniture in, my next job will be to build a chookhouse and a run for the ladies I will rescue from a battery.
I’ll raise them a Henry. That was the name of a pet duck a buddy of mine had when we were growing up. He would chase us down and bite us and would go out of his way to attack. And he was fast, he could run as fast as we could and here he’d come, biting the crap out of us every time we went into “his” yard. In his defense, birds just didn’t like me. We went to Sea World when I was a kid. I was standing by some big pond to get a picture taken and a big ol’ swan comes over and bites me, but he was a lot bigger than Henry. So don’t get swans, either.
I think if you pulled up in our yard, you might think poor, ( and to hear the kids tell it you’d be right). Chickens roaming around, old pallet compost bins, goat out in the front yard, dog barking. Old barn missing a few boards. I smile every time I think of what the relatives from Irving, California thought when they pulled up for a visit.
There are a lot of hawks, racoons, possums, and you can hear in the evening, a coyote once and a while, but we do not seem to loose any chickens. These are wandering about all day, sometimes a couple hundreds yards away in the fields and woods. Most nights I don’t even close the coop door, only about half ( a dozen) go in the coop at night anyway. Others roost around the barn and in with the goat.
Now its spring we get about 1/2 dozen brown eggs a day and one or two white. The white ones must be laying somewhere else around the barn. Not going to fun to stumble on some August day. We give eggs away to anyone who comes near.
Not all roosters are mean, our Red is a great looking, big, bird but is timid. The hens used to pick on him. I have not yet seen him in 2 years to be aggresive to anything. He follows a group of hens around and tries to act the part, but isn’t fooling anyone.
They are messy and at times can be loud, though you get used to the rooster, but they are pretty amusing to watch as they patrol the lawn & garden for bugs. If your nearest neighbor is a couple football fields away then free chickens are great. Six would be good, Over a dozen maybe not.
When we had chickens as a kid, the rooster was the one which was my pet. He was very gentle.
When they hatched, he was the first out of the egg. He looked so lonely in the incubator that I took him out and carried him around with me. I named him Codgermaroo, and he followed me everywhere, apparently thinking I must be his mother.
I used to take him out to the barn and hold him up to the wall so he could peck off the spiders. This enriched diet must have been the reason why he got so big. Honestly, I think I could have won a prize with him at the county fair: he was a big, beautiful bird and was the unquestioned leader of the flock.
None of our chickens were mean. They must have gotten used to my presence when they were chicks and accepted me as a member of the flock. The only time they ever got mean was when it was beheading time and I don’t particularly blame them for that.
Well, they’re across the street and the chickens themselves are penned up neatly in the backyard. I could chuck a half-brick but it wouldn’t get to the bastard rooster by a factor of about six…
Mostly I know it’s there 'cause I hear it in the morning when I’m going to my car. I’ve also heard it when coming home from a very late night, cruising into my driveway at 4 in the morning. I’ve heard it on a slow Sunday morning when getting the paper at 10. Our neighbors are within line of sight but only barely within earshot if you shout, so Mr. Psycho Chicken doesn’t so much wake us up as punctuate the morning when we go outside…
They’re going to raise chickens, not grow peanuts.
You should poison the neighbors, not the dog! :smack:
I’d love to have chickens, but it’s against our neighborhood’s CC&Rs, plus my Chow would love it too much!
Chickens in the yard = poor? No.
Chicken in the bread pan pickin’ out dough? Yes.
On a farm it’s not wierd or a connotation of here lives a poor hick. I love that word, I never get to say hick in conversation anymore. Yes farmers do call the owners of run down farms hicks.
Here are some problems to consider, which are less of a problem if you have a chicken yard.
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Chickens will cover the yard in highly amoniated shit.
a. The house will stink when you open the windows.
b. You will not want to walk in the yard, because your shoes will be full of it, and track shit into the house. Have you seen a mad farm wife that has chicken shit covering a couple floors? -
Chickens pull up green shoots, so they will eat your sprouting seeds in the garden.
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Chickens scratch in the soil all the time so they will denude the lawn and ruin the plants in the garden they didn’t eat as tender shoots.
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Chickens will disappear in quantity if a wild animal is near. Having a feneced chicken yard and coup will save many chicken. Don’t be suprised if half a dozen disapear at a time.
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They go wild and are very hard to catch once they are wild and they will chase you. Have you seen the heel spurs on a rooster? The cocks in cock fights are a good example of wild roosters.