About four years ago, hand raised four chicks to maturity, one turned out to be a rooster and had to let it go. Not long afterwards, fence between my dog and the three chickens had loose boards, and the dog...well. Anyway, two years ago adopted two hens used to dogs, stood up to dog and were fine...then about three months ago, red chicken (Popeye) was eviscerated in the orchard during the day...then this morning, at 4:30 am was awoken by commotion in orchard...Mr. Racoon had come to party. My hen McNugget was the guest of honor. Now chicken free and that's the way it will be...

My grandmother raised chickens (among other things). I learned early in life I'd rather raise Cain....

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So many S&W's, so few funds!!

Apparently urban chicken ranching has become all the rage. My son living in Baton Rouge has a coop in his back yard with 4 hens. He is eagerly awaiting the day when they give him the first eggs. He lets them out to run during the day and ay night he heards thm into the coop. I call him "Mr. &%^$ing Greenjeans" He has no idea what I mean.
He has invited me to the monthly chicken swap at the Denhem Springs Tractor Supply which I think might be an interesting experience indeed!

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Forum consigliere

When you are younger it is fun to have animals to raise....at this point in life I have a hard enough time taking care of me. Plus I don't want guard duty at 2 am.

A neighbor raise chickens for eggs and unfortunately a monthly coon, fox or bobcat. all you can eat special

When the lit'l lady and I married, my dad gave us 50 er 60 laying hens.


We sold eggs, enough every week to buy our other groceries...We ate purty high on the hog too.


.

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"IN GOD WE TRUST"

Funny thing; I opened up and saw your post. I just finished washing my hands from “dressing” a young rooster that had decided to prove that he wouldn’t be fenced in.
He was just a lad at six months but he was becoming a bad influence on his sisters and brother. So this morning when I went to feed, he wanted to play his usual game of “catch me if you can”. Well, it was a good opportunity for me to show my teenage son how Grandma used to do it.
Rowdy Rooster is taking a nice long hot bath at the moment. And later today I’ll be introducing him to some onions and pasta


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

My father did the chicken thing when we kids were young and able
to collect the eggs.
It was fun for a while, then the light went on..........

Fenced yard and hen house was 7-8 miles North of SF Calif. and
after five years half the birds were killed by vermin and the killer
was one or two weasels that got into the pen and did them off.

Dad turned the area into a "Berry plot" where we kids would be
at work again in a year or two.

Growing up we kept a couple of chickens at our suburban home, not sure how that got started. We got some eggs and never lost one to a predator. Mom has us move the coop each year and plated strawberries in the old location. We had huge strawberries.

Mals

Even though I bought a dozen Grade A Large eggs on sale last weekend for 70 cents, they can cost upwards of $1.50 to $2.00 a dozen. Keeping a couple of chickens would probably save me $50 a year in eggspenses. Big bucks!

Chickens, feed, and time are free... aren't they?

Small scale production has a few financial disadvantages in my mind. I think I'll keep buying my poultry products at the grocery store.

[QUOTE=CAJUNLAWYER;140104516]the monthly chicken swap/QUOTE]
This and a Capt. Kangaroo ref.
sounds good to me...

I've had chickens around pretty much ever since I was a kid. This may seem odd to some of you, but we never did name any of our chickens. In fact, when you've got a whole flock of Rhode Island Reds, it's pretty darn tough telling one from another.

Nope. To be quite honest, chickens don't make very good pets. You can't housebreak 'em. They're dumber than a Dixie cup. That's probably why you don't see any trained chicken acts, seeing eye chickens, herding chickens, or guard chickens.

Sure, raccoons, skunks, weasels, and foxes love chickens. That's why you learn to build chicken runs out of galvanized mesh instead of the stuff they market as "chicken wire" or "poultry netting." (Raccoons can bite through that stuff in less time than O.J. took to track down the real killer.)

All of our chickens have been and are raised for a specific purpose...either eggs or meat. After they've been laying for a good solid year or so, I get a new batch at the feed store and send the old girls to the happy hen house in the sky. (For you non-poultry enthusiasts, egg production starts dropping off fairly quickly after a good year. Remember, these gals ain't pets.)

We get more eggs than we can use from our hens, so we trade eggs for honey to the folks across the road who raise bees on their farm. Works out pretty good.

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Pack light and cinch tight.

My daughter and her family raise chickens, guinea fowl and a couple of peacocks. The guineas are self sufficient and relatively smart. Also tasty and the eggs are good though the shells are like trying to crack open a baseball. The peacocks are obnoxious as the dickens. Wild turkeys also abound in the area and everyone knows about them. The chickens are just plain stupid. Everything likes to eat/kill them, including her German Shorthair dogs, and they’re too dumb to get out of the way. She sells eggs and makes about enough to pay for their feed but that’s all. I like to eat ‘em, but they’re not worth the trouble it takes to raise ‘em as far as I’m concerned.

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Everybody could shoot

I’ve figured the best way to raise chickens is to have a friend that raises them.
Sorta like the best way to have a boat.

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Reg. Magnum wants/Rossi wallet

Ex wife wanted to raise chickens. I told her they are nothing but ground vultures. She insisted. Long story short we spent quite a bit for the set up. She thought they were cute as baby chicks. About 6 weeks into raising them she contracted salmonella from them. A week in the hospital and VERY ILL. That was the end of the chicken farm! Yes I love eggs and I love grilled chicken but only from being raised by someone else. Power to yah if you like it!

I like fresh farm eggs and farm chickens. I also like farm pork and cooking a small pig in my fire pit once in the while. I also like the Hutterite colonies we have nearby. What do those two things have to do with each other??

...'farm' type animals in our neighborhood. But that's ok because chickens aren't my thing anyway. My grandparents had at least a dozen chickens in a fenced in area of the back yard. They had little trouble. My sis in law has hers in coop that's bigger/nicer than a cage, but it's pretty secure. They love the eggs.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

Mine would have had names like Saturday Lunch and Sunday Dinner the II. Or the Fried Sisters.

Please tell us you didn't actually teach your teenage son how to "choke the chicken"?

(sorry, didn't get enough sleep last might, couldn't help myself. Might be my judgement is a little off.)

I can think of at least one chicken farmer that did well for himself.

Carroll Shelby, chicken farmer to race car driver, then race car/hot street car builder! Go to any decent car show and you can see his name on many vechicles!

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14 S&W Revs none with locks!

Go to the grocery store and you might find his name on chili spice mix not on chicken.

**** a chicken. I spent several years of my life on a farm with hundreds of chickens. They are evil creatures.

I was raised around chickens and love to hear the roosters at daylight. I still get to hear them but not at home. I go to a nearby lake to do my daily walking. The homes near the tail waters have chickens near so I still get the hear the roosters at daylight but don't have to feed and cleanup after them. Best of both worlds.

We live on a small farm and my wife wanted chickens. She had a friend that would give us some to get started. I built a nice little coop and told her to get a rooster and 3 or 4 hens. She came home with 18 birds ! That was a couple of yrs ago, now we average around 30 running around the barns. The eggs are good but the chickens are a damn mess. We recently built a new coop because she wanted to raise some Silkies. But the wife is happy and that is all that matters !!

Cage free chicken harvesting. Do not try this at home!

I was picturing something like a bale of hay coming out the other end.

To drift a bit:

Don't name your rabbits!

Dad went through a brief period of raising rabbits as his mom had done that on their small farm to help feed her 5 boys.

Mom called us in to dinner one evening and we sat down to a not quite recognizable platter of batter-fried stuff.

My sister kept asking what it was. Dad said to just try it, it was good.

The switch went off in my sister's head and she sobbed: "Snowball?"

She ran to her room bawling, mom started crying and left the table and dad shook his head, grabbed a beer and went to the porch.

Dave and I stared at a pile of fried rabbit, milk gravy, biscuits, peas and smashed taters.

We felt bad for the bunnies for about 20 seconds.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

I think I've posted this before, but here goes again.


WuzzFuzz

"Late again," the third-grade teacher said to little Sammy.
"It ain't my fault," Miss Crabtree. "You can blame
this on my Daddy. The reason I'm three hours late is Daddy sleeps naked!"

Now Miss Crabtree had taught grammar school for
thirty-some-odd years. So she asked little Sammy what he meant by that, despite her mounting fears. Full of grins and mischief, and in the flower of his youth, little Sammy and trouble were old friends, but he always told the truth.
"You see, Miss Crabtree, at the ranch we got this here lowdown coyote. The last Few nights he done et six hens and killed Ma's best milk goat. And last night, when Daddy heard a noise out in the chicken pen, he grabbed his gun and said to Ma, "That coyote's back again, I'm a gonna git
him!'" 'Stay back, he yelled to all us kids!" He was naked as a jaybird, no boots, no pants, no shirt!

To the hen house he crawled, just like an Injun on
the snoop. Then he stuck that double barrel through the window of the coop. As he stared into the darkness, with coyotes on his mind, our old hound dog Zeke had done woke up and come asneakin' up behind Daddy.
Then we all looked on plumb helpless old Zeke stuck that cold nose in Daddy's crack!

"Miss Crabtree, we been cleanin' chickens since three o'clock this mornin'!"

...my grandfather had the last legal chickens in Hartford, Connecticut. He had them until he was in his 80s. Had the best garden in town and my grandmother's roses were nicer than the Arboretums...

In the 1980s I had a small farm in East Texas....with a few chickens. One local dog, whose home I could not determine, kept coming by thinking my place was the local Colonel Sanders... Finally caught him going out under the front cattle gate with a load of 00. Happened to drive my my old place in 2006 and while the house had just been knocked down the gate with a 00 hole in one of the panels was still there...dog ran off yelping and never did come back...

My 96# Lab had this thing about chicken...she would catch and pluck them...finally she killed one of them...took the dead bird and beat her with it yelling "NO"....it was the last chicken she ever plucked.... One day I came out to the barn and the rooster was asleep on top of the dog....guess she got the message....

One nice thing about the chickens...we had about two acres fenced in for the house and barn. Where the chickens roamed there was never any snakes or grasshoppers...I only wish they did as well with fleas and tics...


Bob

My father's parents had chickens on their small farm. They had to go when the area was incorporated in the 1950's. My grandmother made a great fried chicken even with the store bought birds.

I'm a member of the APA and raise pure breed chickens that are on the critical list.....I currently have 30 birds and enjoy the supreme quality of free range eggs....stop by someone who has free range chickens with their eggs for sale sign....yep, they will cost more than store bought....then crack one of those eggs in a pan next to your cheap store bought eggs.....free range eggs are superior and worth the extra cost. I live where I can allow my birds full freedom....if you never raised them and have the facilities to do so...they are very entertaining and smarter than most folks think....It's also fun to hatch your own newbies and watch how wonderful the whole process works...……


spricks

Raising chickens is a lot of work, and not cheap, but worth it. We also keep around 30, and lose more than half during the year to critters. I usually always order pullets, but last fall something got our (gay) rooster, so I ordered 30 straight run this time. Ended up with seven roosters - too many, but maybe one of them will be interested in a hen. Brown fresh farm eggs are worth all the efforts, and more.

When we move to the lake........ the Amish will be near by so fresh eggs should not be a big issue!!!!

My brother came home with about 5 chickens one day. My dad thought it would be a good project to keep him busy, even though we already had a lot of animals. We started going to chicken shows and got more and more chickens, all different breeds, some fancy some not. Several of them we won at raffles. A couple years later we had 38 chickens and about a dozen quail.

The chicken coop was an old well house and a 747 jet engine shipping crate. There were two doors but they had secure locks the raccoons couldn't open. They were locked up from evening to 9 am so the roosters wouldn't annoy the neighbors. They had a netted area during the day but sometimes a few were let out to get bugs in the garden. A few died from playing with the dog.

On occasional Sunday nights when Disney movies were on, we were allowed to select two chickens to watch Disney with us. They perched on the back of a garden chair and my dad put newspaper on the seat in case they had any "accidents". They watched the TV and reacted to different situations like action scenes. It was quite amusing!

We had a few different roosters. The alpha was huge! He was very friendly at times and sometimes you had to steer clear. A few times I wasn't fast enough and I have a couple of scars. My dad would "de-spur" him but he also traveled a lot for business so sometimes he didn't always get to it. We had two small roosters Mille Fleur and Black bantum) that didn't fight with him so we were able to keep them all. My dad killed a fourth, Herman was his name. I cried and got upset but eventually got over it.

The chickens had their own personalities, but breeds have something to do with that. Rhode Island Reds and Barred Plymouth are very talkative and chatter all day long. They are also very curious and will come over to inspect what you are doing. They are very docile.

Having chickens really enriched my childhood and I really hope to have a few again one day (5-6). I already have them planned out. Rhode Island Red, Barred Plymouth, Silkie, Polish, Araucana.

Really glad after my post I didn't get bashed by haters or uneducated chicken fanciers...kudos to those gun wielding folks that actually surprised me by not posting mean thoughts, that us that raise livestock really appreciate all our work for little pay....we try to make a real difference in the harsh world all around...I'm sticking around here more because of the real good folks here....

spricks