Why chickens? Most of the people aware of our little chicken adventure have been enthusiastic and supportive (backyard chickens are definitely an "in thing" right now - but you don't have to take my word for it. If backyard chickens ever had any hipster cred, they lost it all when Willams Sonoma started selling a line of $1000+ chicken accessories. not kidding. click the link) But some people are perplexed by and/or outright hostile to the whole chicken situation. So before I update my loyal readers on the status of the chicks in our basement, I'll try and provide a few of our reasons for getting them in the first place.
I'll tell you one reason we did NOT get chickens: To save money. If you think keeping backyard chickens is in any way an economical choice, you're dreaming. Take a walk over to your local supermarket and head to the dairy aisle. You can probably get a dozen large white eggs for less than two dollars. At that price, we're going to need to get 90 dozen eggs (that's 1,080 eggs) out of these biddies before we even recoup the investment we've already made, and they're two weeks old. Just to be clear, that's not counting any chicken feed, grit, bedding equipment and whathaveyou we spend on them going forward. Not to mention, chickens only lay for two years. Did you know that? They also don't start laying for about 6 months after you get them. After they're "layed out", you just have a passel of avian pets that do nothing useful for you. Luckily they don't tend to be long lived, but you still probably have about a 2 total years where the birds don't lay. Also, chickens are incredibly temperamental animals. They won't lay unless they have between 15-16 hours of light. That means, "naturally", chickens won't really lay in the winter. If you want them to, you need to light their coop on a timer so that they have the appropriate amount of exposure to light. They hate to have their feet wet. If they get "stressed" - and they're easily stressed - they'll lose their feathers, stop laying, or turn on each other. In order to keep them happy, fed, and healthy you need to put in a lot of time and energy. I read a 300+ page book on chicken keeping, and then used another as a cross reference. So if time is money, then we're even further in the hole. And our chicken coop is home-made from scrap lumber by Andy. Imagine how many eggs we'd need to break even on one of those spiffy Williams Sonoma jobbers? Obviously, there are lot cheaper ways to get eggs then ordering 6 silver-laced wyandottes from mypetchicken.com. So we certainly didn't do it out of some misplaced effort in frugality.
We did get them, at least in small part because I am highly uncomfortable eating and purchasing standard supermarket eggs (and dairy products and meat, for that matter, but those are blog posts for another day). I read Peter Singer's The Way We Eat several years ago when Andy and I were first married, and then I made him read it. Although I wasn't completely convinced (and Andy would never be) to adopt a vegan diet, I was forever convinced that I couldn't participate or support industrial agricultural practices. And the worst of the worst - believe it or not, truly the most inhumane farming practices of all - are commercial egg productions. I've read more and more the last few years about the conditions that make those supermarket eggs so cheap. If you missed that Nicholas Kristoff column I recommend you read it - once you do, it's hard to un-read it. It's horrifying stuff.
But of course, just because you object to industrial agriculture practices doesn't mean you need to turn into some crazy back-to-the lander trying to homestead with a chicken coop in your backyard and a dairy goat in the front. It's perfectly possible to buy cruelty-free eggs at the grocery store, which is what we usually do. (Actually, now that we've moved out to farm country, we generally buy them straight from one of the nearby farms, or one of our chicken keeping neighbors.)So the chickens weren't obtained because we have no other way to access eggs we're comfortable eating, that's merely a major perk. We got them, largely, because we wanted the kids to learn something about the relationship between humans and animals with respect to food, and a little bit about the effort required to obtain food, and a lot about the appropriate way to treat animals that provide you food.
I. know. You're rolling your eyes. Listen, in many ways, I am one of the most cynical people on the planet. But I do think that it's a shame that I got to the age of 25 or so before I ever had a serious thought about the treatment of animals in factory farms. And laugh all you want, but this is something that is important to both Andy and I. Am I aware that our kids will totally go through a rebellious oscar-myer-bacon-on-paper-plates-washed-down-with-high-fructose-corn-syrup-while-denying-climate-change phase? yes, I am - and that's fine, but I do believe that when they get over that,they will come out of it as adults with at least shreds of what we teach them now. It's really important to us to model a environmentally and socially conscious brand of consumerism. Some people feel strongly their kids need to go to church every week whether they like it/understand it or not, and we feel strongly that our kids need to recycle and go without hot dogs if we can't find ones we feel good about buying whether they like it/understand it or not. And I seized upon chickens as a bit of a teachable moment to that end. So far, the chickens have been an incredibly rich learning experience for the kids. We talk about them every day - what they need to stay healthy, how chickens behave, what their habits are and how they adapted those habits based on their environment, why they do the things they do (even when they all ganged up on the weakest one and started to attack it). Owen has made a lot of thoughtful connections and comments between the chicken that we eat and the chickens in the basement, and if we end up with a vegetarian out of this that's fine with me. We've talked a lot about how some people think it's ok eat animals, and some people don't, and that we do but only if they are well taken care of.
So, speaking of well taken care of, I'd say our personal chickens are, for the most part. We started off with 6 - and the kids named them Bossy, Chirpy (real creative, there), Rosie, Zebra, Jo, and Caboose. Caboose was so named because she was pretty runty and always seemed to be 'resting' in the rear while the other ladies were eating, drinking or running around. Sadly, Caboose's retiring nature ended up being a symptom of failure to thrive, and we had to remove her from the group so that she wasn't pecked to death. Andy's uncle Tim was thankfully here the day that Caboose needed to be put down and he knew how to do it humanely from his work at the Audobon Society. So now there are 5. 4 of them seem to be growing like weeds and seem larger every time I go down there. The 5th - Jo, we've decided, although the names are hard to keep track of for the other 4 since they all look exactly the same - is much smaller. I'm hoping this isn't a slower-motion version of Caboose's failure to thrive, because Tim isn't coming back to visit anytime soon and I'm worried I'm not up to the putting-down task. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
They're in the basement, still, and will be there another 2 weeks before they move outside. Let's bust some chicken myths: 1) do they smell bad? In a word, no. We have far too few chickens to have any discernible smell. They have pine shavings as litter just like a hamster or rabbit would, and as long as you change it every other week or so you won't have odor problems with fewer than a dozen chickens, especially those who, like ours, have access to the outdoors. In the books I've read, odor control is addressed when people have more than 20 chickens - 20 seems to be the threshold where odor becomes a problem. They certainly don't smell like anything right now. 2) are they loud? Well, you can hear them. They're not loud. they peep, they cheep. I did a lot of research and deliberately got a quiet breed so we wouldn't bother our neighbors, but in general only roosters are really loud, and we (knock wood) have none of those.
Otherwise, we are looking forward to getting them outside. Andy is still working on constructing their coop, a project which the boys have also been involved in and are loving. Once it's constructed, we'll have an enclosed coop for sleeping and nesting and a 10 foot run for the chickens to forage and enjoy the great outdoors in, safely. We're hoping to roof at least part of their run so that they can enjoy the outdoors in the winter, too, when it's not too cold. As soon as the chicks are outside I'll post more pictures, but it's hard right now because that red brooder lamp makes all the photos of the chicks look weird. So for anyone that's not totally chickened-out after this long post (ha! I slay me), stay tuned as the chicken adventure continues.
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