The General Chat Thread (2016-2022)

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SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
The rooster side of life is a hard one. I do not see the point of raising a rooster that is going to have no life. The best it could hope for is a confined space in a sanctuary where it would have a patch of earth of its own. if its lucky it may have access to one hen. They would share a space approximately 2-3m by 2-3m for the rest of their life. That size is actually large. There will be no grass because they will long since have killed it. It will have a chook house of its own and posture and try to fight any other rivals through a fence. It will have rivals on all sides due to the nature of being a rooster and not being wanted. What kind of life is that? Even raising any potential roosters that are bure breeds that are wanted and rare breeds risks that kind of life if I can't sell it to a breeder. I would simply rather it not exist in the first place. That is the reality and it is a hard one that many people can not and do not get their head around. They simply ignore it and leave others to deal with it. People willing enough to section off every area of land they have access to and keep them in the smallest possible and feasible area because there are so very many of them needing homes. I see too many adverts, rooster, free to a good home, rooster home needed urgently - free. etc. and very few of them find homes.

I deal with it because it is very little different from putting down an injured animal at the side of the road. I can not understand people who will not help end suffering of an animal. Vegans who stand of a snail injuring it only then to sit and glue its shell back together? I'm sorry, but if I hit an animal whilst driving, I will and do stop the car, I do find that animal/bird and I make sure that if its injuries are serious enough that it is going to die from them, it is killed immediately. Perhaps I have lived too long in pain myself? I don't know. But the one things I can not understand are people who are meat eaters and can not deal with the death of an animal when they have just caused it. The number of times I have had to despatch a bird (usually a pheasant) or a rabbit or even a deer on one occasion when someone (usually a big burly guy) has just hit it, stopped and is now unable to kill it despite the fact it is clearly suffering and in pain and has terminal injuries... perhaps it is where we choose to live - by which I mean the locations, and the fact that we are often travelling the roads at dawn and dusk. One such road in our second to last place was that bad we used to actually keep an axe in the boot of the car. I am practical. I have not a vegetarian for health reasons, in fact it was actually and hen and chick experiment at school that pushed me into being vegetarian in the first place. I can face the reality where a lot of people can't. I can butcher a wild animal if I want to. I choose not to. I choose not to eat those products. Too many meat eaters don't even want to know what they eat or how it is produced. I simply don't understand that. I also don't understand some vegans and their way of thinking either.

I deal with it the same way that I deal with second hand wool. Why should I dispose of a woollen garment I purchased 25 years ago that is still going strong just because it is not ethically vegetarian let alone vegan. Please tell me how it is either, or even environmentally friendly to dispose (and this is what some want to happen, so as to stop others from using the item) of these woollen tops just because they supposedly no longer fit into being ethically my lifestyle. My lifestyle includes being environmentally friendly, recycling, reusing and repurposing. I don't buy new unless really needed. I hate having to use the car and for decades I haven't unless completely necessary. I have cycled and walked tens of thousands of miles instead of driving them. I grow my own veg and whilst I can't hope to meet all my needs, I can and have often grown most of it.

But at the same point, I also don't understand why as humans we have to live in suffering either. Why we are so darn squeamish about ending life of any type including our own when the outcome is only 1 option and suffering and pain is the only thing that is going to happen between now and the very definite chest infection or pneumonia that kills most in the end. If there is only one outcome and no hope, only pain, why are we so darn set of preserving life that we can not see there is nothing there to preserve? Well I'm sorry, but I feel the same applies here as well and I would rather ensure that the pour thing is despatched quickly and painlessly than for it to stand the chance of ending up being used in cock fighting because I raised it and had to give it away to a total stranger. And yes, I hear about this all the time being on various forums and have a couple of friends who are breeders. Can I have 6 or 7 roosters please? what do you want that many for? How many hens do you have? What ratio hens to roosters do you have? and they can't come back with the correct answers because they aren't planning on keeping those roosters alive. They may eat them, they may let their dogs kill them and eat them. They may be releasing them and hunting them, using them for target practice (it happens) or they may just be raising them to fight to the death for sport. No, I'm actually more responsible than that and vegetarian or not, I have a responsibility to prevent their suffering unnecessarily and if I can't do so, I should not be keeping chooks in the first place.

People have no idea what happens to them. They would rather pretend that there wasn't a problem in the first place and live between walls of concrete watching a make believe world on TV, ignoring reality outside of the city boundaries. I can be vegetarian, or veggan (vegan plus eggs which is what I am) and not be inhuman. I can be veggan and kill injured animals and prevent their suffering. I can be veggan and be responsible for the animals I raise.

Sorry rant over. You touched a raw nerve.
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As I said in a previous post, I understand why, knowing a creature is going to have a bad/hard life wouldn't be easy to live with. I am a meat eater but I also understand that food production isn't all pink and rosy, many young animals are despatched for various reasons, I don't like it but have to accept it. I could never kill an animal even if it was suffering, pets go the vet to be dealt with humanley but I myself could not.

I would hate to see a loved one suffer and I am in favour of assisting to help someone 'move on'. Of course their have to be laws and safeguards but we should be able to make that decision ourselves.
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
The rooster side of life is a hard one. I do not see the point of raising a rooster that is going to have no life. .
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Then why are you breeding the hens at all? Its not a requirement of hen keeping and I would have thought that given your views, you wouldn't want to bring unwanted animals into the world that you will have to kill. I kept chickens as a kid. Just 2 hens who lived for many years and laid plenty of eggs, no problem.
 
morning glory said:
Then why are you breeding the hens at all? Its not a requirement of hen keeping and I would have thought that given your views, you wouldn't want to bring unwanted animals into the world that you will have to kill. I kept chickens as a kid. Just 2 hens who lived for many years and laid plenty of eggs, no problem.
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We are not breeding hens. We never intended for this. It was our only option. I had a feeling you had completely forgotten the very reason our hen is sitting on eggs. I'll cover it one last time and then that is it.

It wasn't our choice. it was hers. the problem we have and which I have covered previously in this thread (or another one here with you) is that she went broody overnight. She didn't slowly go broody, she suddenly went broody, totally broody, 100% with no out option, like a light switch. One morning she was acting weirdly, that night she got into a nesting box and hasn't left it since. I didn't miss any warning signs. There were none. The others I have managed to prevent or stop, breaking the cycle simply by ensuring they didn't sit in the nesting box after the eggs had been removed, but with this chook it wasn't the case. My only options to save her life and it is that serious because of her age and the temperature at present, and she will sit there until she gets chicks or dies trying, was to allow this to happen naturally. My only other option was to try to dunk her and hold her in cold water 4 or 5 times a day to lower her body temperature to break the cycle. I would need to do this for roughly a week! She is a seriously large hen. I have 4 broken ribs. I struggle to hold her without broken ribs. I can't even pick her up with them. So my options were to let her sit on eggs or let her die. There is also no guarantee that the cold water treatment would actually work. its a 50:50 option and I would end up with a very large hen whose trust I would have broken and with me doing something I would hate myself for and put bluntly didn't want to do and would physically and mentally hurt me to do.

Dunk her regularly in icy cold water for 1 week (50/50 chance of success), let her sit on eggs for 3 weeks, or let her die starve herself indefinitely? Not great options.

We chose the kindest one we could. We let her sit on eggs for the first time in her life once we knew she was committed to it, which she has proven. So we find ourselves with not being able to go away over Christmas and the New Year, not being able to go away for our 20th wedding anniversary and not being able to go away for my birthday. We have given all of that up and a lot more (not visiting relatives in Australia, not exploring at all etc), we have given it all up, just for her, so that she lives because it is very hot here and the longer she sits on eggs the hotter it is getting (we started summer 6 days ago apparently - toady is the first day it has dropped below 28-30C in the last 2 weeks during the day). Broodies effectively go on a starvation diet once they start sitting on eggs until something hatches. No-one ever expected 9 eggs still be viable at this late stage. I hadn't expected more than a couple of chicks from this at best. 9 eggs that are clearly alive at Day 17 has stunned everyone. With her size and her deformed feet we had expected most eggs to be crushed. Even the lady breeder who gave her to us has been surprised at how good a mother she is turning out to be.

We didn't want or need the extra expense of this either. It would have been cheaper all round just to have killed her but I couldn't. Money for our holiday has been spent on her. Fertile eggs for her to sit on. A separate area created for her. New wood and expensive new netting purchased to protect her and the chicks from attack - rodents, birds of prey aplenty, snakes etc. More netting purchased after I ran out, to make the outer run chick proof and safe for them once they are old enough to be out. Expensive non-medicated chick feed, twice the cost of medicated stuff, purchased for them. New feeders, new water containers, new... and the list goes on. The holiday fund spent on a 6 year old chicken just so that she doesn't starve herself to death trying to hatch eggs that would never hatch. It was not for us. It was all for her. We now have to deal with the consequences.
 
morning glory said:
Then why are you breeding the hens at all? Its not a requirement of hen keeping and I would have thought that given your views, you wouldn't want to bring unwanted animals into the world that you will have to kill. I kept chickens as a kid. Just 2 hens who lived for many years and laid plenty of eggs, no problem.
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<=== lights blue touch paper and retires to a safe distance...
 
epicuric said:
<=== lights blue touch paper and retires to a safe distance...
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I had to ask.... I just hope the poor hen doesn't mind some of her chicks being killed. I really can't understand the logic here, I'm afraid. It seems more like sentimentality for the broody chicken taking precedent over the lives of several baby chicks (not to mention the quality of lives of its owners). And what if she becomes broody again... same process?

....again, MG lights blue touch paper and retires to a safe distance... :whistling: This time I'm going into hiding.
 
morning glory said:
I had to ask.... I just hope the poor hen doesn't mind some of her chicks being killed. I really can't understand the logic here, I'm afraid. It seems more like sentimentality for the broody chicken taking precedent over the lives of several baby chicks (not to mention the quality of lives of its owners). And what if she becomes broody again... same process?

....again, MG lights blue touch paper and retires to a safe distance... :whistling: This time I'm going into hiding.
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You make a very valid point which I hadn't thought of. It doesn't quite seem to follow the natural order of things. Must dash...
 
morning glory said:
I had to ask.... I just hope the poor hen doesn't mind some of her chicks being killed. I really can't understand the logic here, I'm afraid. It seems more like sentimentality for the broody chicken taking precedent over the lives of several baby chicks (not to mention the quality of lives of its owners). And what if she becomes broody again... same process?

....again, MG lights blue touch paper and retires to a safe distance... :whistling: This time I'm going into hiding.
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I may be quite wrong but a chicken's life span is 7 to 8 years. The chicken is only 6. Killing the chicken would lose more eggs than just getting rid of any roosters.
@SatNavSaysStraightOn, how do you tell baby chicks apart?
 
Cockerels, if castrated are known as
Cinisajoy said:
I may be quite wrong but a chicken's life span is 7 to 8 years. The chicken is only 6. Killing the chicken would lose more eggs than just getting rid of any roosters.
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This may be true (in terms of viable laying life) - but I didn't get the impression that the decision was made on economic grounds.
 
Not sure why the chicken would mind - loss of that sort is a human concept. The weakest of a litter [or clutch] is often destroyed by it's siblings in the wild and the parent bird/animal takes little notice.
 
sidevalve said:
Not sure why the chicken would mind - loss of that sort is a human concept. The weakest of a litter [or clutch] is often destroyed by it's siblings in the wild and the parent bird/animal takes little notice.
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I realise that, of course. I was simply making a point (probably rather gauchely) about the contradictions inherent in such a situation and what happens when sentiment enters into decision making about animal welfare. I may have it wrong, of course. The decision to give the broody hen some eggs may be purely economical. But it doesn't sound like it from the last para of @SatNavSaysStraightOn 's post.
 
Totally off topic:
I just discovered you can use food coloring to paint on wood. Do not use them straight but dilute with water to get the color you desire.
Have a scrap piece of wood to get the colors right.
 
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