I was talking to a friend the other day. She’s a gentle soul, a kind-hearted person who says, “I could never kill an animal” with wide, pained eyes that let you know she’s not talking in hyperbole.
She wants chickens. She wants them bad. She wants the experience of fluffy little chicks and she wants hens to weed for her and she wants her daughter to have that mini-backyard-petting-zoo experience.
She has, up until now, not given into her chicken-keeping desires. For this I am so proud of her.
You see, there’s a reality to chicken keeping that doesn’t show up when you are scanning Pinterest for gorgeous coops. (I maintain a Pinterest board of chicken keeping and coop inspiration, by the way, if you are into that kind of thing.)
A continuous supply of plentiful eggs requires a continuous supply of hens at laying age. For us non-commercial chicken-keepers, a good rule of thumb is that hens will lay pretty consistently (with periods off for molting, reduced day length and broodiness) from about 6 months old until about 3 years old. Although you will hear a lot of anecdotes about individual hens that keep pumping out eggs until they are 5 or 6 years old, the general consensus is that three years old is usually the beginning of the end for consistent egg laying.
Call it Henopause.
“Woh. Was That A Hot Flash?!”
A well-kept backyard hen, protected from hawks, raccoons and Fido, can easily live to be 8 or 10 years old, and ages of twice that are not unheard of.
Bear with me here as I do some Urban Homesteader math. One layer hen eats about 1.5 pounds of layer feed per week. (Pastured birds will eat less purchased feed – yet another good reason to buy this book and study it before you design your coop and run.)
If a chicken starts laying at 6 months old (this is a bit later than average but it makes my numbers easy) and has essentially stopped laying by 4 years old, and lives naturally to be 8, a backyard chicken keeper is looking at 3.5 years of egg production time, and 4.5 years of Pets Without Benefits time. That’d be 351 pounds of feed going to a hen that isn’t making eggs!
Current, local prices for the layer rations I feed my hens is $28 per 40 pound bag, or $.70 a pound. Admittedly, this is a bit spendy, but I get the locally produced, happy-hippie, GMO-free feed from the lovely folks at Scratch & Peck. At those prices, it costs $245.70 to maintain a hen into theoretical old age and natural demise while you aren’t getting any eggs.
Which means those half-dozen cute peeping balls of fluff you take home from the feed store in spring could cost you $1474 during the time when they are not giving you eggs. And of course I’m not including the cost of bedding, a fractional share of the coop, potential vet bills, etc.
Meanwhile, if you live in a city or suburb, you have an even bigger problem: your now non-laying hens are taking up your legal urban chicken quota which could be filled with younger, laying hens, and you are stuck. You can’t just keep adding to your flock indefinitely when you live on 1/12th of an acre in Seattle. So now you are a Backyard Chicken Keeper without any Backyard Eggs.
If your hens are pure pets, this is all totally fine. These are very reasonable amounts of money to spend on a pet, and if you are not resentful in the least at having to buy both chicken feed and grocery store or farmer’s market eggs, then Chickens As Pets is a wonderful path to take.
There is another option, of course. This is the option you won’t tend to run into on Pinterest. It’s not the solution of a soft heart so much as a calculating head.
You can make the decision to cull your birds when they are past prime lay. This is what all commercial egg operations do, and what “real” (as opposed to “urban”) farmers do, and what everyone who makes a living and not just a hobby from animal husbandry does.
Culled laying hens aren’t good for roasting or frying but they make unbeatable stock and stewing birds.
So basically those are your two choices: you continue to pay and care for chickens that barely give you eggs or you cowboy up and you deal with the slaughter of no longer profitable hens.
Back to my friend who really, really wants chickens.
Could she kill her chickens?
Oh no. Absolutely not.
We both agree, she doesn’t have that in her. Fine, I’ve no problem with that, and I’m glad she knows herself.
Does she want to pay for chickens even if she gets no eggs?
Well, not really.
Fine, I wouldn’t either – I totally understand.
I told her quite bluntly (as is my way) that she should not get chickens.
Can I give them to a chicken sanctuary when they get too old to lay? Some place that has a no kill policy?
No. No. You cannot do that.
She can’t, and no one reading this can. You know why? Personal responsibility. Your chickens, your adoption, your decision, your responsibility to see it through to the end. You do not get to embrace the idea of a more intimate relationship with your food chain and then make that food chain – the food chain you specifically set up – someone else’s problem when shit gets real.
There is a local urban farming message board that is filled – filled – with people trying to give away their three year old chicken to a “good home.” Are you kidding me? You own the chicken. Your home is a good home. And once it’s not, your soup pot is a good soup pot. I once joked to a good friend that I could stock my freezer for the entire year off no-longer-laying hens being given away free “to a good home.”
This pisses me off, as you can probably tell. There is absolutely nothing ethically superior – and quite a bit that is ethically dubious, if you ask me – about enjoying the benefits of a young laying hen and then turning over the care or slaughter of that hen to someone else once it stops laying.
That is not how animal husbandry works and it’s not how pet ownership works, and those are your two choices. I don’t care which path you take with your chickens, but pick one. Playing Little Suzy Farm Girl until it’s time to get the axe and then deciding you aren’t up for chicken ownership just doesn’t fly with me.
Normally I am a Rah-Rah Cheerleader for this quirky way of life, and I think any fair assessment would deem me particularly encouraging to beginners. But a chicken is not a seed packet, it’s an animal and a responsibility. If you can’t cull your own birds or can’t provide for them all the way into their Chicken Social Security, then please, do not get chickens.
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Great post Erica. Amen.
Can we just go ahead and expand this from just chickens to every other freaking pet people may be tempted to get? If someone can’t handle any “end of life planning” and all that entails, better not get that cute puppy/kitten/foal either!
I am so sick of seeing people dumping their old dogs and cats on craigslist and their old, crippled horses at the auction. Just take some damn responsibility people and put YOUR old animal down!
Thats so true about people dumping unwanted animals…Florida has a big problem with huge boas now.
When you are a kid and you say “Mom, dad, I want a puppy!” your parents sit you down and give you the stern talk about cleaning up after the puppy and feeding the puppy and walking the puppy and housebreaking the puppy and perhaps then you don’t want a puppy anymore. Once we are grownups, no-one does that anymore so when we have romanticized visions of something (chickens, boats, motorcycles, tattoos, etc.) it is easy to miss the downside, the risk, and the eventual endgame. I think, in fact, there should be a version of this post for a whole lot of other crazy notions that adults sometimes get…
I have found that both my alligator and burmese python love chickens and are not agist whatsoever.
We have a bit of land in the country. As I am vegetarian, I chose to buy pullets, and to have no rooster, because I didn’t want to have to kill any. We have plenty of room, so a large part of the diet is what they scratch and find. I have a feeder for their pellets, so they help them selves. I find that when they moult and go off the lay, the pellet consumption drops a LOT. I keep my old girls, and I never see my one last geriatric hen at the feeder. So I’m thinking your calculations may be a bit off.
But as for no killing hens – Our dog suddenly developed a liking for chicken and I arrived home one day to find he had managed to get into the run, killed one chook and ate (most of) her, but had also wounded another so badly that there was no way she could survive, but in the mean time, she was suffering dreadfully. My husband was at work, I knew no one locally, so I had the choice of leaving her to bleed out of her ears, eyes, mouth, body until she died a natural death, or kill her quickly myself. I chose the later, but it was horrible and a real ‘loss of innocence’ for me.
I guess what I’m saying is, even if you plan to let your chickens live out their natural lifespan, you must be prepared for the possibility of having to kill, if only to put a creature out of its misery.
Excellent and well put point.
This is so true. My husband usually takes care of any chicken killing, but once we had a very sick hen that I just couldn’t let suffer until he got home from work. I had to do it myself. It was very very hard and I cried. But it was still the right thing to do.
So true! The old girls eat much less food, and would rather nibble in the yard than chow down the crumbles. And the old girls have so much personality and history. I tell myself that I could kill one if I was hungry enough, but so far no need.
The reason we got chickens in the first place was to reclaim the fertility of our backyard and to stop supporting antibiotic cruel egg factories. The old hens still do a good job of fertilizing and entertaining.
And there is no substitute for a good broody. We have bred some hybrid chicks that seem to have the best attributes of their parents. The father is half Rhode Island Red and half Barred Rock. The mother is Americaunus. The chick looks like a very large Americaunus but has red instead of gold coloring. Redneck, I call her. She is only 5 months old and bigger than her mom already. Nice eggs too.
There is nothing wrong with humanely killing a chicken. But I prefer to keep the old girls around. They don’t cause any trouble.
I haven’t read through every comment (and I do enjoy them as much as the posts) so forgive me if I “double up”. I am also quite blunt with the starry-eyed-chicken-want’ems. The reality is that sometimes chicken get sick, like a prolapsed vent and they need the kindest and quickest cull. Even with the best security and practices in place, some other animal may get in and maim your chooks, this is the time for a kind killing too. I find most people aren’t prepared to do this. We hate doing it but needs must but that is no reason others should assume we can do their dirty work for them. So glad you have done this post Erica.
I mostly agree with Erica, but would take it a few steps further. We have raised chickens for 13 years on our little piece of land. Currently, we have about 50; half are one year old, and half are two. The 2yos will be going into the soup pot this fall; we actually should have done it already last fall, as the economics really don’t support keeping them. We have strictly production breeds–our hatchery calls them “browns” and “blacks”–and they lay heavily for 1 or two years. We’ve tried lots of other fancier breeds over the years–and if you want healthy eggs at the lowest cost–don’t bother with those! Three years with any breed is really STRETCHING it, in terms of laying efficiency. If one really keeps good records, this will be evident.
Here’s the reality: it doesn’t save you much money to raise your own eggs, unless you are already buying the super expensive “cage-free” or “free range” eggs from the health food store, etc. As Erica mentioned, you are feeding your pullets for a good 5.5 to 6 months, no eggs. Feed is VERY costly, even buying the regular ol’ stuff directly from a feed mill. We partially free-range and have lots of scraps, but it still costs a lot. Then they come into production a bit slowly, and you get a couple months of lots of eggs. If you live in northern parts of the US, once winter sets in and daylight hours decrease, unless you add artificial lighting, the egg production drops significantly. So plan on not having very many (if any) eggs in the coldest parts of winter. Then they pick up again significantly in early spring-maybe late Feb-March, but at some point that summer or fall, depending on breed and age, they will moult, and you won’t be getting eggs then either for a good while. Add to that any birds that you fed for many months and end up eaten by a stray dog or predator, and you are looking at a pretty expensive venture. Honestly, the only way to even break even is to raise more chickens than you need and sell the extras. This almost pays for our own eggs. Maybe.
If you think you will want to hire out the butchering of a medium sized flock, add a LOT more to the bottom line. Having chickens butchered is NOT cheap, especially when all you may be getting is an old stew hen. If you want the meat for good stock, then your best bet is to learn to do it or find experienced friends to do it with you. Otherwise, selling or giving them away on Craigslist is the way to go…someone will always want those, amazingly.
We’ve gone about this venture over the years in an educated way–read lots and lots of books, thought outside the box, tried new methods and new breeds, kept good records, and it always boils down to this–it costs a good deal of money to raise your own chickens.
So here’s what we do: buy only the production breeds (and there are still nice-looking, good good tempered good ones to choose from). Choose a different color each year to tell them apart. Only keep them for 1.5 to 2.5 years, then cull. If you don’t wait till the 3-4 yr+ mark, they still make good eating if you prepare them right. We put several carcasses in as many big pots as we can fit, slowly simmer for a minimum of twelve hours with herbs and onions, garlic, etc., and then pull all meat off the bones. This meat can then be frozen, and the stock pressure-canned (or frozen also.) Gorgeous stock. But we prefer to pressure can the meat as well. With a large breed, you can plan on about 1.5 birds per quart jar. This makes for wonderful quick winter casseroles and such. It’s work, don’t let me kid you. But no waste.
Now, of course, if you just want pets….just plan on them being extremely expensive. Chickens eat a lot. They are messy and smelly. You have to continuously clean out their quarters; they don’t mind pooping anywhere they please, including their nest boxes. The compost is great, but you have to have a way to deal with it on a regular basis. They eat bugs, but not the ones you really want them to. 🙁 Tick control is spotty at best. Running free, they like nothing better than to destroy your young plantings and scatter mulch everywhere….every day. Even ONE chicken can wreak havoc in a garden–and we have 1/2 acre gardens–and that one chicken that gets loose will always find her way to the tomatoes or strawberries, or juicy cukes, pecking holes in each one, scattering the mulch from around all of them, looking for bugs…
Sorry so long-winded. But for the newbie who has these idealistic pictures in his mind, he needs to be aware of the significant drawbacks. That said, we still raise a zillion chickens each year cuz they’re worth it. 🙂
agreed! we got into chicken keeping knowing absolutely that we would be spending more than what we would if we just bought eggs, and we’re fine with that. we like knowing absolutely, without a doubt, how our hens are treated, how healthy they are, what their diet is and exactly how old our eggs are, so we’ve been willing to make the investment necessary. With the cost of building a coop, run, buying feeders/waterers/bedding, brooding boxes with heat lamps, number of roos we’ve inadvertantly raised (even after paying more for sexed chicks), and how long it’s taken for most of them to start laying (some as long as 10 mo because of failing to plan around the season), plus losses from predators and one that died suddenly of an egg blockage, and rats who’ve gotten in to our expensive feed, our eggs are worth their weight in gold 🙂
Thank you for adding this perspective!
I just have to tell you, most of you people are disgusting. Truly, truly disgusting. Animals are not disposable tools or toys for your whims or profit bor gratification. This includes both chickens and dogs. They are living beings just like humans.
If you don’t have the space or money to support an animal for it’s lifespan, don’t get one. Pretty simple. If a hen has made it safely through its laying years–perilous as they are–she has produced plenty and has earned a safe and happy retirement. How would you feel if the day you retired from your job, you got your head chopped off? Why shouldn’t you? After all, you aren’t being “productive” any more.
The same goes for neighborhood dogs. If someone else’s dogs is killing your dogs or livestock, I’d say you aren’t doing a good enough job of protecting your own. Responsibility goes both ways, children. I’ll say another thing, too. I’d think twice about shooting someone else’s animal and thinking there won’t be consequences. No matter what the situation may be, if a neighbor killed a dog of mine, I’d make damn certain that person paid a high price for it.
Thanks Erica, for doing your part to point this fact of livestock ownership out and open it up for discussion! I have had to kill two of my birds to date. I have had 12 chickens over the course of the last 4 years. My first rooster (not allowed within City of Portland) was honestly re-homed to the country with a contractor friend that has a farm and needed another rooster. The second rooster was slaughtered in our backyard and he became dinner one night, he was very tasty, despite being the first kill I have ever made and however emotional that act was for me. The last was one of my original girls (and she was very sweet and followed me around) that became lame to the point she needed to be put out of her misery as she could not eat or drink anymore on her own. I cannot say that killing my own chickens is easy, but it is necessary…and if you are going to own chickens or any livestock you need to be able to deal with it.
Are there local butchers who will slaughter for you? Or can they not take random birds raised outside licensed facilities?
I too would love to know this!
Yes, in Portland area: http://harringtonpoultry.com/
They will process one bird or many, whatever you need. They charge by weight I believe.
I don’t put my cats to sleep when it’s time to say goodbye. I call a specialist, their vet. I don’t see what’s wrong w/ hiring a specialist to humanely dispatch of my birds so that it’s done quickly and safely. Even farmers often hire out mobile butchers so they don’t have to have high grade facilities (we had a neighbor that did just that in a huge farming community–he was well-employed). Humans have had specialist jobs as long as they’ve had communities…back to the land doesn’t mean you have to do it all by yourself. Yes, you should be aware of what you will do when your chickens get to non-laying years, but no harm in hiring out.
I think people are missing the point. Erica didn’t say you couldn’t hire someone to slaughter your animals. Of course many farmers do this because of the economy of scale. We hire someone to slaughter our goats because we don’t have the equipment to do so. Her main point was not to foist these animals onto someone else , specifically rescue organizations or saying “good homes only” because they are inconvenient for you now that they don’t lay. Either treat them as livestock or treat them as pets. There’s no gray area here.
It is INCREDIBLY important to learn to slaughter even if you intend to keep them as pets because sometimes they get sick or injured to the point where you can’t save them and you need to end their suffering immediately. This is esp. important if you don’t live near a vet that sees chickens.
“This pisses me off, as you can probably tell. There is absolutely nothing ethically superior – and quite a bit that is ethically dubious, if you ask me – about enjoying the benefits of a young laying hen and then turning over the care or slaughter of that hen to someone else once it stops laying.”
This is what we are responding to–being told it’s ethically inferior to turn the slaughter over to someone else. I know how to quickly kill my chickens if I have to to stop their suffering, don’t you worry. And my mobile slaughterer is making a good living. What’s the problem?
I personally am sick of self righteous people telling me what to do w my animals. If I want to adopt them away and someone else wants to take them and everyone ends up happy, what business is it of anyone else? Doesn’t hurt you or the world any if a bird goes to a new home. I’m not loosing them into the woods or foisting them onto the humane society. It’s between me and the person who takes them in- mind your own business.
If you read the whole post and not just take stuff out of context and say “see! She doesn’t want people hiring slaughterers!” you would realize that she’s not demonizing people like you that hire out. Her problem is with people giving them to rescue organizations, animal shelters or requiring that the next owner not slaughter them but rather take on this livestock animal and only do with it what they deem fit but are unwilling to do themselves (keep it as a pet).
I am self righteous about animal care. These are animals, not effing rocks. I feel the same way about people trying to give away their dogs or cats because they suddenly became inconvenient for them. Maybe if people were forced to put them down or keep them they’d think twice about getting them in the first place.
Emily: you are right, a more considered writing on my part would have been, “turning over the responsibility of care or slaughter over to someone else once it stops laying.”
As it happens, my brother in law worked for a mobile abattoir for several years and so I am very familiar with how they work and how tremendously important they can be in the world of local meat production.
A farmer who hires out physical slaughter of an animal to a butcher is still responsible for that slaughter. They are still “making the call” as it were. This post is intended as a wake up call to people who aren’t prepared to make that call and want to find some mythical somewhere else and someone else who will continue to provide for their hen or deal with the responsibility of the slaughter for them once the egg laying years are past. My hope is that this post helps prospective chicken keepers think about “chicken end of life planning” before they get birds.
This is why I don’t like the “recycling” program in Denver. They don’t call it what it is, and they essentially waste the meat. It’s a disconnection from the responsibility. I mean yes, the chicken keeper is making the call, and they know what is going to happen to the hen… but it’s sugar coated in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Like not recognizing plastic-wrapped meat from a case was once a living thing. Maybe I’m wrong though. I could just be getting caught up in semantics.
Here Anisa, this one’s for you:
Very well written. Thank you Erica.
I really love your blog posts, and this one was such a pleasure to read. Not because I like to see old hens being slaughter per se, but because I see such a disconnect in our society between the farm and the dinner table, and this post serves to remedy that. I applaud what you are doing. You’re helping hundreds, maybe thousands of people reconnect to where their food comes from, and whether you realize this or not, you may be helping them gain a greater appreciation for the hard working folks who produce food for a living at a relatively low cost to the rest of us. Keep it up!
My partner and I went into chicken hood with our eyes wide open. Did we want the eggs?, Yes. Did we want the bug control? Yes. Could we Cull these birds? Nope, never. We made them pets and we feed them Scratch and Peck. We fully understand that our view is of the minority in the world of “farm animals” ” If they aren’t productive, well you have said it already, We know that predators will takes them ( not yet thank god) and we know that we will be feeding them into there retirement home, and we know that most people think we are crazy! The girls still have value, without egg production. They will still help me till, they will still help add goodness to our compost, they will still help with insect control in and around the goat area, and they just make us smile. We get our meat from local sources and know that if it has a name, well them we can’t eat it. 🙂 I’m weak, and i’m proud!
Thanks Tiffany, for saying what I’ve been thinking while reading all these foaming at the mouth posts about killing animals. What is so wrong about having pets that provide eggs for a couple years, then still socialize with you while you are gardening, till your raised beds and compost during the winter when they quit laying? Do you kill your dog when it quits fetching the tennis ball? If you want to raise LIVESTOCK, then do that, and sell/butcher/eat the animals to your hearts’ content. But for what are plenty good reasons to us pet owners, the eggs are great, but the years of neighbors coming by in the evening with their toddlers to see the chickens, and meeting new neighbors who chat over the fence while we’re outside cleaning the coop, these are rewards in keeping pet chickens. There’s a whole generation of youngsters in urban Portland who have chickens in their family’s day-to-day reality, along with dogs, cats, goats, rabbits, and ducks. They learn more than can be quantified here by this experience, because not everyone can live a rural farm life to learn about animals and growing food. Instead of vilifying people for breaking out of the sterile suburban stereotype, coming down off the mountain might make you more allies within your community.
Yay for you, Laura! Well said and I agree! Chickens are wonderful pets beyond their duty of egg-laying. We find them integral to trying to live a healthier lifestyle with gardening.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying this! Too many people want the ‘fun’ part, then want to dump the ‘reality’ part on someone else…like their friendly neighborhood farmer or acreage owner. This goes for house pets, too (oh, c’mon, you’ve got lots of space for just one more cat…), and it drives me nuts. It’s great to have someone put it out there, point blank, like this!
9:13 And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which
cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? 9:14 Then
said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us.
That last was me. This is God…
three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is
enough: 30:16 The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not
filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough.
30:17 The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his
mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young
eagles shall eat it.
30:18 There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four
which I know not: 30:19 The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a
serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and
the way of a man with a maid.
30:20 Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth
her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness.
“Culled laying hens aren’t good for roasting or frying”
Um……what the heck ever gave you that idea? Maybe if you are a terrible cook and don’t know how to work with meat. A domesticated laying hen’s meat is still far more benign than anything you shoot in the woods.
I think I do okay in the kitchen, and with meat in particular. 🙂 I think old hens are best stewed. Flavor is excellent, texture not so much at that age for dry cooking techniques.
I found our culled hens far tougher than wild grouse. Not that grouse was overly tender, but it has never been so tough as our old hens.
The way I figured it, buying baby chicks in San Francisco was basically just an agreement that we were gonna buy land in NOT San Francisco in the next 4 years or so. Call it a farm-gettin’ insurance policy. After all, we’re gonna need more chicks soon, and our older ladies can still show them the ropes!
Way to tell it, Erica. Bringing the farm to the town, one has to own it.
It’s a hobby for me. Keeps my mind busy so I don’t go out and cull all the stupid people out there!
First I must say that our chickens are pets. And they give us more eggs than we can give away. But our girls are also hard workers in our organic garden beds and till the soil like no machine can. The fresh compost is never ending, and it’s hard to put a price on never buying poor soil in a bag at the plant store again!
Our solution to expensive organic feed (and it is) is growing lots of cover crops. This results in healthier chickens and tastier eggs. Crop seed is cheap, too.
We’ve had chickens for a few years and I don’t worry about them getting old and not laying. Even if they cut back in production (an egg a day IS a lot to ask), they still have to battle the tough life of being a chicken- heat, hawks, diseases, dogs, raccoons- and these are in a well-protected coop/run. Two years ago, we had 24 chicks developing along. This march we were down to 9.
THANK YOU FOR THIS.
Great post! I also get steamed at the “free to good home” plea. If you simply can’t stand the idea of killing it YOURSELF, but don’t mind the idea of someone else doing it, sell the live bird as a stewing hen for $10. Let an urban foodie have their way with her and be done with it. But begging for another person who shares your “no kill” values (implied in the “good home” phrase) to care for a pet that YOU want to discard…grrrr.
Amen, sister.
Live on a 50 acre farm, we raise numerous meat animals on pasture. Backyard chickens are one of my top pet peeves.
In addition to the problem with the “no-kill” lunacy, without acreage to rotate the chickens on, they inevitably are living on a scratched dirt floor of their own feces. How is this better than confinement? It’s just different.
Not to mention, without access to pasture or homegrown grains to mill, any “green” or “sustainable” benefit of keeping backyard poultry is quickly erased by the buying of feed in sacks. The amount of water, fuel and resources used to create that feed is likely never contemplated; if it were there wouldn’t be any false pretense of sustainability.
I agree, that if you are one dimensional in your chicken thinking (chickens supply eggs OR chickens are pets) then keeping chickens is probably not for you. We still have our first chicken, after 8 years, and she still lays almost as consistently as when we first got her. She is a jungle fowl, so her numbers have never been very high. The three intense years are for the commercial breeds. However, we don;t JUST keep chickens for the eggs. If we did that, maybe a battery cage would become acceptable to us. We grow broccoli and other brassicas, and the chickens have become quite adept at catching the cabbage moths. They also love the caterpillars that do get to hatch, but there are not so many of them. They also provide us with manure, so that we buy very little fertiliser for our veggie garden, and they turn over our veggie beds between crops, and add manure while removing bugs and weeds, including a good proportion of the weed seeds. If you look at ANY of the food producing items in our garden in one dimension, you may decide not to have them. The cherry tree produces cherries that are ripe over about two weeks, and does nothing for the rest of the year. And all those leaves to dispose of…what a mess. BUT! if we look at the other functions of a cherry tree, it provides shade, the pruning make good wood for smoking food with, the leaves (which I don’t really dispose of) are useful as mulch or compost: in fact, I put them in the chicken run, and the chickens turn them over, break them up, eat any bugs that might be among them, and make excellent humus. One dimensional thinking creates waste and pollution. Get multidimensional, and design so that outputs of one system (excess chickens) become useful inputs (cultivators and pest removers).
Thank you for illumination of the multidimensional approach! By outlining the prolonged benefits, coupled with the cherry tree comparison, your comment is both realistic and certainly more helpful than an opinionated rant! (hint, hint to author of site!) For further consideration, if someone truly wants to get rid of their chickens at the 3 – 4 year mark, cut can’t bear to slaughter their specific pets, likely a farmer in the area would be glad to slaughter for you for a nominal fee. When you receive your little group of birds back, packaged for freezing, you will not know which is which so it make it more palatable to those of us ‘faint of hearts’. Another option would be to trade off slaughter duty with a like-minded local. Be sure you’re in tune on feeding practices etc. Each cull your own stock and trade your culls for theirs. That way, you’re not slaughtering or eating your own pets, and neither are they. It’s a win / win!
]Anyway, Thanks, Adrian for an insightful and respectful comment! 🙂
I love this post and the comments. It’s a good rule to follow…and it’s one of the reasons I will never be a farmgirl. 🙂
My mother kept backyard hens for a couple of years, until she had to move and re-homed them. For her, they were pets as well as egg providers — When one hen wouldn’t stop sitting on her eggs, my mother bought chicks for her to take care of. It was really fun to raise the chicks and they were very low-maintenance, eating mostly leftovers and from the garden. I have a 2 year old son and I wish those chickens were still around for him to experience! I think they are worth the cost and effort if you think of them as pets. If you just want eggs, maybe find someone else to buy from.
Just for the record… If anyone is unwilling to cull their birds but understands that culling is what must occur. I am happy to take them off your hands.
This post is wonderful and informative! I couldn’t agree with you more! Thank you! As someone who one day wants to have land with animals ( chickens), I appreciate you bringing reality to a place where others do not. I would make the same decision as you. Do you plan on getting more chickens after than or being done with chickens?
I personally am sick of self righteous people telling me what to do w my animals. If I want to adopt them away and someone else wants to take them and everyone ends up happy, what business is it of anyone else? Doesn’t hurt you or the world any if a bird goes to a new home. I’m not loosing them into the woods or foisting them onto the humane society. It’s between me and the person who takes them in- mind your own business.
yes.
This article caught my eye and I’ve bookmarked your blog to keep up. I hadn’t even considered that this situation would create problems for people in the chicken world. In all edible animal circles, there seem to be the two polar opposite groups. Those that have livestock for pets and those that farm them for their product. I have friends who’s kids raise market animals for the fair and then bring them home instead of selling them…eyeroll. If that’s what floats their boat, I’ll just look the other way.
Don’t get me wrong. I adore every single animal on my property. I enjoy working the sheep and watching the flock dynamic (wish I had a dog to work the sheep with me but…) I name them, we show them at fairs and take them to petting zoos. But when they reach that magic age or weight, I eat them. I still love them…with roasted garlic, mint sauce, whatever.
We raise dairy goats for their milk. My daughter has started a business making soap and lotion from all of that beautiful milk these girls give us every day from January to November. We sell the young castrated males to petting zoos and people who want to eat them. I would eat them but I prefer lamb so I let others eat the goats. I’ve tried it…if I didn’t have sheep I would eat them.
We raise and show registered Southdown sheep. We name them, ear tag them, show them, breed the best & eat the rest. This breed of sheep makes a tender, well-marbled piece of meat that cuts with a fork like prime-rib. Can you tell I am a huge fan of lamb? I also pelt the lambs when they are butchered to make beautiful rugs. So keep loving them even longer that way.
My chickens make me happy. I order some every few years or I let a hen go broody here and there. I eat the roosters as early as I can tell they are male. Those are my fryers. I don’t roast my own layers, I have been known to order a batch of cornish-rock crosses for my rotisserie…
My retired layers go into the crock pot or the stock pot. Coq-au-vin is a gourmet dish designed to use an older hen. There isn’t a chicken too old for an enchilada.
So, believe me when I tell you…I really love my animals.
It’s O.K. for you to keep them as pets and feed them into eternity. I would never castigate someone who felt this way. Why then, do I get put down, argued with, scolded, bashed, etc. for simply enjoying the blessing that each and every animal on my small farm gives me? If God didn’t want me to eat them…He wouldn’t have made them out of meat.
To each their own…live and let live. The world is a big place…plenty of room for all points of view!
Isn’t there a cheaper alternative than layers mash for the older chicken?
Yes, but if you have a smallish urban flock on limited land (my target audience for this post) it’s probably not realistic to keep separate feed streams going. The quickest way to reduce your feed cost for any chicken is to set up as much free ranging time as possible.
I have a flock of 10 (maybe a few more soon as I have two broody sitting on eggs). They are all still laying but I went into this with the idea that I would cull them and replace them when they stopped laying. With that said I grew up in a city and I live in the suburbs. I have no idea how to process a chicken. I’ve done some research online and bought a few chicken raising books but I am terribly frightened of doing something wrong when the time comes to “do the deed.” I have never seen or been taught how to kill and clean a chicken. I wish there was a class for that or something. What’s a girl to do?
This is a great video I found extremely helpful.
Just google it. I’ve seen a few very helpful tutorials with pics. It definitely takes practice though! DH built a chicken plucker (google whizbang chicken plucker for instructions) and it whips the feathers off in a mere 20 seconds. Used to take me half an hour to pluck a chicken and it’s horrid work if you ask me. Now we’re going to get meat birds this year.
DH also built a sort of sink/countertop on wheels to help with the slaughter. He bought a 6 ft piece of formica countertop and we found a small sink at the fleamarket for $5. He inset the sink, put a 5 gallon bucket underneath, hung a hose above. And for scalding we use a large enamaled canner and a campstove. Thankfully Ziploc makes 2 gallon size bags for freezing the birds.
For killing he has one of those orange traffic cones, hung upside down, bird goes in head first, pull down on the head to make the neck taut, sharp knife, fffffttt the jugular, but just the jugular. Don’t cut the windpipe…. it’s unnecessary. Let them bleed out, scald, pluck, chop off head & feet, eviscerate, keeping the gizzard, heart, liver.
I think the hardest part is getting the windpipe out of the neck. Oh, and chopping the head off is difficult. You need some stout knives, and a very sharp knife for the jugular. If the knife is sharp enough I bet they hardly even feel it. Very humane way to go.
maybe if you could find someone around you that knows how to do it, then offer to help with the cleaning. thats what i did. and even got a free bird outta it. put an add on craigslist or something….heck even post it on fb.
A friend posted your thoughtfully expressed view of living with chickens on her FaceBook page.
In India, cows that no longer “give” milk are released into the urban environment where they eat scraps given by citizens and shopkeepers. They are respected, though recently evicted from New Delhi, for the Commonwealth Games a few years ago, they are returning to the big city. I doubt that “free-range”, I mean feral, chickens would fair this well if released into the community.
The issue of urban stray cows in India is (from my US perspective) fascinating. It’s a complex thing, for sure. One NY Times article I read compared the cows in Delhi to pigeons in major US and European cities – often annoying but just a part of the urban landscape.
If I didn’t have the money to continue feeding the older hens, I wouldn’t get them in the first place. I want them for more than just the eggs they produce. There is something wholesome and good about watching the chickens scratching in the grass and dirt. I love that image. They are poetry alive for me. I would never trade that for a pot of soup.
Thank you for your post. We have chickens and love and respect them. I wasn’t sure I could kill an animal I’d raised (or any animal) when we started, and assumed they would live out their lives, until we got a mean mean rooster. When we finally decided to kill him it brought me closer to my food than I have ever been. Life dies every time we eat. It is good to know that.
There is a local urban farming message board that is filled – filled – with people trying to give away their three year old chicken to a “good home.” Are you kidding me? You own the chicken. Your home is a good home. And once it’s not, your soup pot is a good soup pot. I once joked to a good friend that I could stock my freezer for the entire year off no-longer-laying hens being given away free “to a good home.”
My friend Janeen calls this “freezer camp”.
OMG! Great coaching!
That cost for when they do not lay is not accurate. Chicken don’t just eat layer and corn, they will eat worms and other bugs. Yes, this is urban, just dig up the dirt for them and give them some worms and such. Also chickens don’t really stop laying eggs. They just start to lay less, say in the winter months when there is less sunlight. Chickens need natural light to produce eggs. So provide that and the cost is brought down even more.
As for killing them, it’s the natural cycle of life for a hen not to produce eggs forever. But not one set am owner has to kill their own chickens. You can sell them, someone else can butcher them for you, you can then sell the meat to a locker. Or let the hen live out their old age. Which the latter is the least practical and rather sad to see, as the other hens will pick on her.
So provide plenty of natural sunlight throughout the year, feed the hens bugs and worms as a supplementary diet, send an old hen off the a butcher ( packing house, locker etc)
Actually this could also be applied for dogs once they’re out of the soft cute puppy state, there is a lot of abandoned 4 year old dogs out there… your adoption, your responsability, so… if you are not willing to take care for this pet of yours for THEIR ENTIRE LIFE, then you are not allowed to have dogs, cats, birds, etc.
This should be required reading for all those folks ‘pinning’ cute little chicken coops and dreaming of ‘living off the land’ one day. I came from a farm. We ate our pets, yes including the pig that followed Mama all around the yard and the ducks and everybody, all delicious. I could still ‘dress’ a chicken if need be.
This is a perfect post. Fantastic.
p.s. If you want to see heads spin, try rabbits. They are much cuter than chickens.
yeah someone was selling baby rabbits at a festival here in Louisiana and I bought. my son asked me why and i told him we had to have something to eat for christmas dinner.
Thank you for writing this article. I’m a former rural Oregon girl now living in NE Seattle and, having raised chickens in my youth, I am quite conflicted about the reality that chicken coops seem to be the latest landscaping fashion accessory for middle-class, urban, home-owning families. I strongly believe that people should have an appreciation for animal husbandry and children should know where their food comes from. Unfortunately, a lot of folks are setting up coops in their back yards with these intentions, but are oblivious about the physical, emotional and temporal responsibilities that they are signing up for.
Great article! This was super timely for my sister, mother and I as we were just talking about backyard chickens last night, and what to do with them after they stop laying eggs. I have no problem consuming the chickens that were previously “pets” in the backyard but I know I could not take care of culling, cleaning, butchering…. Is there anywhere in Seattle or nearby where you can take your chickens to and they do that part for you, returning only clean, ready to cook meat? Sorry if this was asked again, I didn’t have time to read through all the responses. Thanks!
Melissa
I agree with many of the posters that there is another option. The problem people have of getting rid of aging hens on Craigslist is that they add the stipulation that the hens won’t be used for food. Well, that’s ridiculous. Selling them or giving them away to people who want to use them for food is very easy here in the SF Bay Area.
I had to cull a sick chicken within the first couple of months I had pullets. It wasn’t pleasant and I didn’t enjoy it, but I got the job done. I helped that I had been to our meat CSA farm and helped harvest Thanksgiving turkeys. We practiced on old laying hens.
Backyard chickens fall into some gray area between farm animal and pet. That makes people very uncomfortable with idea of dispatching unproductive hens. On a farm when you have a large flock it’s easier to not form attachments. With only a few in your yard it’s different.
I agree that people need to think about this issue before getting hens, but if you’re willing to let someone eat your aging hens you’ll be able to replace your flock fairly easily. There is a local 4H young man here that takes all the aging hens he can, promises to kill them humanely and processes them for food.
I’m not sure I agree with the basic premise – that chickens become useless after 3 years. If you have a flock of, say, 6 hens, “inconsistent” egg laying can still mean an egg or two a day, which will be enough for many urbanites. Obviously, go into chicken keeping with your eyes wide open. But don’t go too far in the other direction, thinking it less rewarding than it really is. And keep in mind that buying eggs from the store pushes off responsibility not only for the death of the roosters and old hens, but for the quality of life of the layers. No easy answers….
Amazing. I was just thinking about this very issue. We recently set up a backyard coop. We live on 2 acres in a very small farming/ranching town in Central Texas. We knew we would lose chickens occasionally. The first loss was a chick that ran under my foot from behind me, apparently trying to get to the other chicks as I was moving around the coop. It was my granddaughter’s favorite one. I replaced it with one that looked almost identical. Fast forward several weeks. The chicks are getting pretty big but the bantams were not big enough. One apparently got out of the nighttime coop and while it was on the ground, a snake got it. Too bad for the snake. Now it was too big to get back out through the chicken wire and I dispatched it with a hoe. It got me to thinking about my relationship with animals over the years. Gotta love the dogs and the cat we have but as far as I’m concerned, they had better be doing something to earn their keep. The cat is catching baby rabbits and possums. My old dog alerts us to scorpions. The newer dog is very tolerant of my granddaughter’s affections and is a very good watchdog with a mean sounding bark. Also eats crickets and other crawly things. We had two rescue donkeys that the previous owner left. They kept the coyotes away but no more than a good fence will and they were going to cost us more than a good fence eventually. Besides, we have no experience with donkeys so we found a new home for them with the help of a rescue organization. It doesn’t do to get too attached to animals. You gotta treat them right but sometimes you have to make hard choices too.
A Facebook post from N.A.I.A. led me here. I thought it odd they would post a link to an article telling people NOT to get an animal, but when I got here, found it to be a great read! Thanks for the information! I have 6 acres in the country and would like to get a few chickens someday, mainly for eggs and perhaps for pest control, if they’ll eat ants or ticks. Not sure if I will develop the guts to cull, but they *will* have a place to live out their lives if I don’t.
Ive heard guinea hens are the best for ticks. Get a couple of those and you wont have a tick for a half-mile in any direction (so I’ve heard)!
Hell yeah! Preach it sister! We are about as close to “real” farmers as you can get in the heart of a major city, and I am constantly harassed by people who dont understand how I can possibly kill an animal, especially one I have raised. They think I’m “weird” or “crazy”? We have even had rabbits stolen and found out later that people were trying to “save” them, even though their dog ate them 24 hours later. Oh yeah, and almost ALL of these people eat meat on a regular basis. SCREW THAT. They are the ones who are completely out of touch with the “real” world and have no concept of where food actually comes from or that we are a part of a real, actual, finite ecosystem that we are wholly dependent on for our survival. Cities and civilization are the illusions. It doesn’t matter how much you cover with concrete, you still need nature or you die. I will not apologize for having the stones to harvest my own meat. And you know what else…I ENJOY IT! I know im not supposed to say that, but I shouldn’t have to apologize for that either. That doesn’t make me some insensitive monster or future serial killer-to-be, it makes me a realistic, self-reliant individual who takes pride in the entire process of growing and harvesting his own food. This isn’t a Disney movie…I like to breed, raise, pet, love, kill, and eat my own meat and vegetables.