Disposable culture

[smudgy_cat]

I know my previous post seems inhumane, but chicken are livestock animals that area primarily raised for food. I think even the special fancy show chickens in 4H get eaten or butchered at some point.

To raise chickens and not be prepared to euthanize them at some point is unrealistic. I think it is very irresponsible to just opt for letting the chicken wander at night, hoping that some wild animal will kill it. If you purchased the chick, raised it to adulthood, and used it's eggs in your meals, you owe it to the chicken to give it a respectful death.

A hatchet and a stump provides a cheap, quick, and relatively painfree death. It's also why the guillotine was a popular form of execution for humans for quite a few years. To contrast, a coyote or raccoon will likely rip apart the chicken and eat it while it is still alive and conscious of what is going on. Even though chickens are pretty stupid, I would never sentence an animal I was responsible for to that fate.

If you can't handle the butchering, at least consider taking the ckicken to a vet or humane society for euthanization. If you are accumulating a flock right now, you may also want to look at the local humane society for chickens.

I know it seems wasteful to butcher an old chicken and not eat it, but sometimes it has to be done. Because our chickens roamed an enclosed area between 1/4 to 1 acre at any moment, they weren't tender yummy chickens. Chickens are tender and juicy when they are butchered young and not allowed to move around freely. They also taste better when they are fed large quantities of corn and grain that cause them to gain weight and fat.

The older chickens are edible, but they will likely be tough. If you want to get around the toughness, you can marinate the meat in alcohol (wine, beer, etc) overnight. You can also use a commercial tenderizer, which will partially breakdown the meat. It's also helpful to debone the meat and use the metal mallets and pound the meat. Using all three methods together will likely give you really good results. If you want the roasted chicken, you'll have to really marinate it and be ready to accept a tough chicken for dinner.

However, I think it's easiest to just choose recipes that work with the chicken. You can boil or pressure cooker the chicken and then pull the meat from the bone and cook it into a pot pie, a casserole, or stew. You could also do enchiladas or stir frys, or anything else that works well with small pieces of meat.

If you do go for a larger flock, you might want to build it up gradually so that you are adding and subtracting a few chickens each year instead of decimating the entire flock every 3 years.

Also, keep in mind that raising chickens can get expensive in time and money. You have to shovel out the coop, buy straw for the nest boxes, buy insecticides and cleaners to spray in coop and nesting boxes, buy proper foods and supplements, as well as gather eggs and change food and water every morning. You have to be home early in the evening to lock up the coop, because otherwise animals might harm the flock at night. You also have to get up early to let them out because hens want.to.lay.that.egg.now. Leaving town will be a lot more difficult for you, because you'll have to find someone to tend your flock when you are gone. You may have willing volunteers now, but chicken care gets really old really fast.

[soapandwater]

I didn't know that the prize chickens often get butchered, too! Well, that puts a whole new twist on Charlotte's Web, if that same sort of thing applies to pigs.

This is such an interesting thread. How many eggs do you usually get from your chickens? Is it really more cost-effective for you, if you have to buy all those things accompanying raising chickens?
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When you got a hundred voices singin',
who can hear a lousy whistle blow?

[xuli]

[honeybee]

[brightcorner]

Be warned: I'm about to divulge some chicken-raising details...

We have three hens, who each lay about two eggs every three days: this is enough to keep us & our housemates (3 adults & 1 kid) in wonderful fresh eggs plus pass a half-dozen to various neighbors now & then to keep them from complaining about the early-morning cackling. And it's absolutely true, really fresh eggs make the supermarket variety taste like old plastic.

Our chickens mostly eat kitchen scraps, with a minimum of commercial feed on the side: "layer crumbles" is around $15 for a 50-pound bag (I get organic stuff), which lasts me over a month. As far as calcium supplements go, I believe oyster shell is quite cheap, but we recycle the egg shells instead: you just rinse them out, let them dry, then crush them and mix them in with the hens' feed. Works great!

I don't use any insecticide; I just clean out the coop often. Instead of hay for the nest boxes I usually use dried grass from our (very overgrown) back yard. I do buy wood shavings for the floor of their hutch, which makes cleaning it a lot easier, but one jumbo bag lasts so long I can't remember when I bought the current one (or how much it cost). All in all I think if you have the space, keeping chickens is a huge savings compared to buying eggs!!

I could just gush on and on...I am totally sold on "back yard flocks". You probably noticed that.

Our only problem has been RATS. Still haven't managed to solve this one, although our cat helps.

[soapandwater]

I absolutely love eggs, and I can't imagine them getting better! I wonder if there are any farmers I can go hit up for some fresh eggs.
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When you got a hundred voices singin',
who can hear a lousy whistle blow?

[stprcsm]

but letting the coyotes have the old chickens may encourage the coyotes to come closer to your home then is prudent.

[honeybee]

i thought about that, but if we have chickens and goats, the coyotes will be around regardless of whether the chickens are loose or not. at least, this is true for our future neighbors, though their dogs protect their goats.
i had a few chickens once before (that were left behind by the cabin's previous inhabitants) and it took only a few weeks for something to kill them off. possibly a bobcat, possibly a coyote.

anyhow, my husband eats chicken, so he may very well do the killing and eating, though i'm going to have a hard time with the whole process. some farmer, huh?
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*honeybee.etsy*