4 ms·

My wife kept bantam chickens as pets for a few years. It was worth doing. They turned out to be more articulate, intelligent little creatures that I gave them

My wife kept bantam chickens as pets for a few years. It was worth doing. They turned out to be more articulate, intelligent little creatures that I gave them credit for before I started and they had a lot of personality. I built a nice PVC coop that used a doghouse as sleeping area. Advice: Find out about chicken diseases, supplements and chicken doctoring before you start. Downsides: Chicks are cute. The whole laying eggs and hatching them is educational for the kids, but a lot of them grow up to be roosters. Roosters don’t live together peacefully and the fighting can get vicious. For us getting rid of the extras turned out to be difficult. Chicken females have a strict hierarchy and the bottom one gets hen-pecked - it’s unfair and a bit upsetting and there’s not much you can do about it. With the kids they turned out to be “death with training wheels”. We buried quite a few of them, so it was a good opportunity to practice and discuss death and the rituals that we have around it in a simpler context. There are a lot of good websites and books aimed at keeping chickens at home, but they tend to have rose coloured glasses on for the most part.

uberman 5y ago
I want to echo that our experience of raising chicken and kids was also positive and educational. I was stunned at how social chickens can be. One of my kids could dress them up in capes without complaint.
downut 5y ago
"For us getting rid of the extras turned out to be difficult." But for millenia, for most, it has not been difficult. You start with chickens, maybe for chicken tractors. Then you have roosters. And then you realize your agrarian fantasy is generating too much vegetative "waste". So you get a pig. In order to make it "self sustaining", you need a male. And now, you have to learn how to process whole pigs. I'd do it, and have, in bits and pieces, but the part I really don't like is: no vacations.
- uberman 5y ago
  While I can't speak to the pig part, a good feed and watering solution will allow you to go on shorter vacations no problem particularly if you have an enclosed run.
  - nemosaltat 5y ago
    Can confirm, we’ve raised hens for about 7 years now and a good feed system (we’ve landed on rainproof containers that allow the chickens to feed at will) and a large water reservoir with drinking cups has allowed us to go on short trips with ease. For anything beyond 4 days, we have someone stop by to check water levels and remove eggs from the hen boxes. We recently introduced a bantam rooster to our flock- he’s great and he’s really helped with the pecking order issues, but now we have to pull the eggs every 2 days at most (to avoid creating balut[0]). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food)
    - mod 5y ago
      I've done similar things. I use 25lb dog feeders for chicken layer pellets (inside), I have an enclosed outdoor run, and I had a nipple waterer with a pretty big reservoir. And neighbors to check in in the past, although now I have camera systems I can view live, and just ask my neighbor to stop by if something is amiss. Overall it makes it relatively easy to leave as-needed. For me, one neighbor stop is typically going to mean I can be gone a couple of weeks, with likely no issues.
    - mostertoaster 5y ago
      I’ve seen people hook up like the toilet tank float system with a hose on, so that when the level gets low it just fills up automatically again. Then combine that with little nipped feeders, and at least for water they can be good for a long time.
    - downut 5y ago
      So... I was raised for a while on a 3 generation compound with quite the animal menagerie, including chickens. I can imagine a situation where the chickens are entirely confined. Ok, we never did that. For us, the roosters flew to the high branches of the quite large grapefruit trees. There they were mostly safe, and were of course expendable anyway. The hens (sometimes ducks) were locked up nightly in a rather carefully built hen house completely enclosed in a chickewire box. Maybe 20'x10'x10'. You could walk around in it no problem, along with the 10 or so chickens and the roost box. This was on the edge of the Everglades in S. Florida. We had a variety of varmints. The varmints occasionally breached the defences. Repairs were occasionally required. Losses happened. That's what I wonder about entirely confined chickens, while granting varmints more or less unlimited time to work on the problem. What's the difference? And there's that "recently" word lurking in my parent... we'll see what the spillover effects are. I'm going to add that I've had a box turtle for 27 years, and my last cat lasted 16 years. And we have traveled multiple weeks multiple times a year for decades. I am all in favor of personal enslavement to an agrarian fantasy. For many years my wife the master gardener has besieged me (the cook) with the fruit of her 5 raised beds. It took us about 4 tries to get through a summer (in AZ at 5500') without having to monitor/water the garden semi daily. We fixed that, with occasional failure. However, you have to concede significant losses if you travel around harvest season: stuff really wants to leap off the plants in a timely manner. So... all I am saying is that this is not a simple game if it lasts for a significant part of your lifetime, if you want to travel.

uberman 5y ago

I want to echo that our experience of raising chicken and kids was also positive and educational. I was stunned at how social chickens can be. One of my kids could dress them up in capes without complaint.

downut 5y ago

"For us getting rid of the extras turned out to be difficult." But for millenia, for most, it has not been difficult. You start with chickens, maybe for chicken tractors. Then you have roosters. And then you realize your agrarian fantasy is generating too much vegetative "waste". So you get a pig. In order to make it "self sustaining", you need a male. And now, you have to learn how to process whole pigs. I'd do it, and have, in bits and pieces, but the part I really don't like is: no vacations.

uberman 5y ago
While I can't speak to the pig part, a good feed and watering solution will allow you to go on shorter vacations no problem particularly if you have an enclosed run.
- nemosaltat 5y ago
  Can confirm, we’ve raised hens for about 7 years now and a good feed system (we’ve landed on rainproof containers that allow the chickens to feed at will) and a large water reservoir with drinking cups has allowed us to go on short trips with ease. For anything beyond 4 days, we have someone stop by to check water levels and remove eggs from the hen boxes. We recently introduced a bantam rooster to our flock- he’s great and he’s really helped with the pecking order issues, but now we have to pull the eggs every 2 days at most (to avoid creating balut[0]). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food)
  - mod 5y ago
    I've done similar things. I use 25lb dog feeders for chicken layer pellets (inside), I have an enclosed outdoor run, and I had a nipple waterer with a pretty big reservoir. And neighbors to check in in the past, although now I have camera systems I can view live, and just ask my neighbor to stop by if something is amiss. Overall it makes it relatively easy to leave as-needed. For me, one neighbor stop is typically going to mean I can be gone a couple of weeks, with likely no issues.
  - mostertoaster 5y ago
    I’ve seen people hook up like the toilet tank float system with a hose on, so that when the level gets low it just fills up automatically again. Then combine that with little nipped feeders, and at least for water they can be good for a long time.
  - downut 5y ago
    So... I was raised for a while on a 3 generation compound with quite the animal menagerie, including chickens. I can imagine a situation where the chickens are entirely confined. Ok, we never did that. For us, the roosters flew to the high branches of the quite large grapefruit trees. There they were mostly safe, and were of course expendable anyway. The hens (sometimes ducks) were locked up nightly in a rather carefully built hen house completely enclosed in a chickewire box. Maybe 20'x10'x10'. You could walk around in it no problem, along with the 10 or so chickens and the roost box. This was on the edge of the Everglades in S. Florida. We had a variety of varmints. The varmints occasionally breached the defences. Repairs were occasionally required. Losses happened. That's what I wonder about entirely confined chickens, while granting varmints more or less unlimited time to work on the problem. What's the difference? And there's that "recently" word lurking in my parent... we'll see what the spillover effects are. I'm going to add that I've had a box turtle for 27 years, and my last cat lasted 16 years. And we have traveled multiple weeks multiple times a year for decades. I am all in favor of personal enslavement to an agrarian fantasy. For many years my wife the master gardener has besieged me (the cook) with the fruit of her 5 raised beds. It took us about 4 tries to get through a summer (in AZ at 5500') without having to monitor/water the garden semi daily. We fixed that, with occasional failure. However, you have to concede significant losses if you travel around harvest season: stuff really wants to leap off the plants in a timely manner. So... all I am saying is that this is not a simple game if it lasts for a significant part of your lifetime, if you want to travel.