Comment by qq99
2 days ago
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater.
BUT, there are definite upsides:
- Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and can become quite tame. They can purr.
- I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
- It's fantastic to get ~8 free eggs per day (from 13, 3 are not laying this winter)
- Morally/ethically, it seems like the best way to eat eggs if you're caring for them in a loving manner (compare to factory farms)
Consider the downsides:
- You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
- Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses
- Veterinary services can be harder to find. Most vets don't want to deal with chickens. However, it also tends to be cheaper than a vet for a dog/cat.
- Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
- If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I think there are more upsides than downsides, but you should think about these downsides before taking the plunge. Don't let it dissuade you. Overall, they have enriched our lives immensely and I would recommend it to others!
1: https://www.anthonycameron.com/projects/cameron-acreage-chic...
I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong.
They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.
Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.
Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.
I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.
That was a nice personal discovery.
It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
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It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others".
I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)
One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.
So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.
I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)
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I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones.
It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.
Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)
Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.
Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.
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My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.
I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.
The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough.
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
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> More people will start to find...
...that roosters are total assholes.
There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.
Have chickens and they are dumber than fish. Have no qualms about eating them.
I’m from a rural area. I have formative memories of raising caring for and slaughtering animals. Hunting and fishing, literally put food on the table. I don’t remember anyone complaining that the chicken in the gumbo came from the yard.
I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.
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> More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?
Wait until we find out how intelligent broccoli is.
Considering the bizarro world we're now living it, I wouldn't put it beyond us for it to go the other way.
If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!
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Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.
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I don't eat sunflower-seeds, as sunflowers murder one another by throwing shade.
As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden.
I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)
My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.
My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.
Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.
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The kinds of intelligence they display is really interesting.
They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle.
They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
At 2 years old my son could blind taste test tell the difference between my neighbor's chicken's eggs and store bought eggs.
He refused to eat eggs (still doesn't) until we convinced him to try one of the eggs from our neighbor's chicken's. He liked that egg. Every time we've tried to pass (fancy!) store eggs off to him as our neighbor's eggs he's called us out for lying to him.
He'll reliably eat eggs from the chickens across the street and nowhere else.
So yes, there is a difference in taste!
I think you demonstrated that eggs taste different, but not better.
My 2 year old would only prefer to eat frozen chicken nuggets. That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
Taste is subjective. Sounds like his son preferred the taste of one over the other.
My kids prefer nuggets over the whole roast chicken my wife and I eat. The salt, MSG, and seasoning of the nuggets along with the fat from the oil tastes better to them. Sadly, nothing I say will convince them otherwise.
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> That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
It will depend on whether the whole chicken is chicken proper, or one reassembled from nuggets.
eggs are homogenous in nature, so a blind test between two eggs can reveal the superior quality of one type of homogenous product. Especially when it is an egg, which is entirely "natural"
a chicken nugget is not the same thing as whole chicken, because it has many chemicals, additives, flavouring agents, msg, organ meat, etc and is then battered or crumbed and deep fried before being packed. It also has a different texture altogether, and is eaten with the hands which children find easier than using cutlery.
compare a child tasting two different varieties of dark chocolate in comparison to a milk chocolate with caramel filling, or two varieties of whole milk to chocolate skim milk, et cetera.
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Nuggets are mostly skin and cartilage, so maybe that preference stems from the nutritional needs of a growing child.
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My 2 year old daughter never liked eggs. We started buying some from a neighbor who pasture raises his lay hens (and feeds them more chicken-appropriate feed).
She eats her eggs and asks for more. If we run out and I fry up some store bought ones, she refuses to eat them - even when I don't tell her where they're from.
Same goes for chicken meat from the grocery store vs. pasture raised broilers from another neighbor.
When it happened the first time it was something of a canary-in-the-coalmine situation for me.
Taste (and health) are two things the market doesn’t select for.
People say that all the time, but professional cooks have run triangle tests on backyard/farm eggs vs. store bought eggs and people can't tell the difference. At this point, I don't believe there's a difference in taste. The psychological effects that would lead people to believe that difference exists --- a kind of culinary placebo effect --- are so strong that I just attribute everything to that.
Anecdotally I have regularly switched between store-bought eggs and eggs from my friend's little farm over the last 20+ years, and try as I might, regardless of consumption method, I have yet to taste a difference. I have also asked many friends over the years if they notice any difference and all have agreed with me.
It doesn't matter though, I still prefer my friend's eggs to store-bought ones, I'd rather not support that dirty industry.
I cannot tell the difference between backyard eggs and fancy store bought (organic, free-range) eggs, but I can tell the difference between that set and industrial store bought eggs.
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Anecdata also, but I can compare the eggs at home (homegrown) vs. any normal restaurant around and there definitely is a notable difference in looks and taste.
That said, this applies to scrambled or fried eggs.
Omelettes not so much, as seasoning might play quite a big part, and even less with cakes, baked goods, etc. in which eggs are just one more ingredient.
Honestly, does it matter? If raising the chickens that yield your eggs makes your breakfasts more enjoyable, is physical vs psychological causality relevant? The important thing here is enjoyment of our food.
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This backyard chicken and that backyard chicken does not have to be the same tho
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I wonder how much of this is due to there simply being different types of chickens. I would guess that most commercial egg layers are from a specific or small subset of optimized chicken types. While there is a larger variety in the type of chickens people raise in their back yards. My brother has 3 different types of chickens and each lays visually different eggs.
Quails. Even cuter than chickens and much more easy to keep. Might be one of the easiest to keep animals overall. Not even ant colonies, fish, cats or dogs are as happy with as little as quails.
Housespiders and cacti might be easier.
You need to use quail proof feeders, tho, or you're going to spend a fortune on kitchen scraps or whatever you intend to feed them. They eat just about anything peckable except oats (if you didn't end up with picky ones). Cookef rice, seeds, peas, boiled eggs, sometimes nibbling on each other (-.-), or dirt cheap quail feed. Also mealworms ... its catnip for quails.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation.
I recommend cutting the head off with a pair of high quality, large and well maintained scissors.
Put a bucket in front of you, put the scissors from behind on the neck, just below the head, and cut in a single strong motion.
The lil birdy will not understand what is happening and wont feel uncomfortable during the process. Its head then looses consciousness in sbout 15 seconds, compared to about 30 seconds for the cervical dislocation method. (It'll loose the ability to feel pain MUCH faster than 15s, but I dont think we know how quickly. But probably faster than it'll realize that there's pain in the first place. You've probably cut yourself before and noticed that the pain only kicks in after a moment.)
It is also way easier to not screw up. Just remember to ALWAYS cut the head off completely, as fast as possible. Lil birdie wont die from bloodloss, but sudden loss of spinal fluid, which is WAY faster.
The cervical dislocation method is also very effective, but also much easier to screw up, a bit more uncomfortable for the birdy and could introduce quite some anxiety for the birdy if you hesitate for even but a moment.
On the other hand the cute little critters dont understand how scissors work or what they're for. Even if the method is much less pretty, it's by far the most peaceful method for the birdy.
I've had chickens for probably 15 years now, starting with 3 and ending up with about 20 (mixture of hybrids, pedigrees and rescued battery/farmed hens) and 2 geese. This happens a lot with chickens. Chickens are a gateway drug to more chickens. If you have a few chickens, they take about as much looking after as a rabbit - keep their food and water topped up, and clean them out once a week.
I agree that you won't make money or a profit. The coop money you will probably never earn back, but I can cover the cost of a sack of feed (£12 or so) by selling boxes to colleagues for £1 each.
I think the eggs taste better because a) what the hens eat and b) because they are much fresher.
I've had to kill chickens (and hate doing it), which is sad, but I've never taken one to a vet. It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
We've brought chickens inside the house when they're ill (we have tiled floors) but don't do it on a regular basis. If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets. Surprisingly smart and pleasant animals. This will also sound weird but if you pick one up, they also smell nice - kind of like a new puppy smell.
Sounds like the true answer is having a colleague you can buy £1 eggs from.
£1 egg is quite expensive tho: 10 free range eggs at Tesco cost like £3 or so.
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Eggs are still pretty cheap in the UK, free range ones for £1.50 or so.
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Hahaha - possibly!
> It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. By analogy, it makes no sense to have my cat go to the vet either (and pay thousands of dollars for a ~$50 cat lol), but they still go. I guess it's all about personal choice and perspective. It does feel a bit silly in a way though
> but if you pick one up, they also smell nice
Agreed, a clean chicken can smell really good!
> If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets
That's the big thing! On Japanese twitter, chicken diapers are a popular item!
> It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
This logic is confusing. You are taking a purely transactional view when it comes to the chicken’s health, but you also admitted they don’t turn a profit. In that vein, it makes no sense to get the £20 chicken in the first place.
Your utilitarian view is also the opposite of what the person you’re replying to is describing. Do you believe that if one gets a pet cat or dog for free from the street and they get sick, “it makes no sense to get an £X vet bill on a pet which was free”? And if not, what’s the difference? Neither is making you money.
I think it is the distinction between "livestock" and "pets".
I would also be very surprised if any vets ever managed to treat a hen successfully. They tend to hide any illness until very sick.
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It makes sense if someone likes chickens in general but doesn't care much about any individual chicken.
I have two geese as well—have you found they help against predators? Anecdotally, we've had no predators steal any chickens since we added them (though a coyote got some goose tail feathers at first), though our neighbors down the street have been decimated by foxes.
Never considered the ROI, but I built a big walk-in coop for maybe $200 in materials. Think that'd pay off with the current price of eggs, if we sold them.
The geese we put to bed every night, and let out in the morning so they are generally locked away when a fox would come. A friend of ours has about 15 geese and pretty sure they have lost goslings to foxes.
They good at deterring delivery drivers though, and generally alerting people.
Is the paperwork in the UK (I'm assuming you're UK-based, hence £) particularly onerous? I heard things were getting more complicated if you just wanted a few chickens in your garden.
According to this website [0] you just need to register with the Animal and Plant Health Agency.
[0] https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/maintain-the-garden/ke...
There is some paperwork now in that you have to register your flock. I dread the day though that we are told to kill our hens because of an outbreak.
It was bad enough keeping them undercover for one winter.
The taste is definitely different, and the reason for its is the diet. Small scale chickens tend to eat a lot of grass, rather than the cheaper feed given to factory farms.
A upside that was not mention is that chickens are excellent in cutting grass and keeping weed out of bushes, especially roses bushes. They generally don't eat fruits on bushes like raspberries, but our strawberries was not safe so we used a gardening net over those (also keeps other birds out). Smaller plants/seed may also need a net until they grown in size large enough that the chickens are not interested anymore.
A major big upside we also got is that they hunt down slugs and other insects that otherwise can cause major damage to a garden or lawn. Even ant colonies, which can often be a pain to remove and a major annoyance if they invade your home.
On the downside, chicken hierarchy is a very real thing and they can get into quite bloody fights with each other.
> If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
It's just the circle of life. Live in a remotely rural area with animals around and you're going to see pretty regular death. For instance foxes are beautiful, extremely intelligent, and amazing animals. They'll also systematically and sadistically kill literally every single chicken inside a henhouse, one by one, if they get in. In another instance a dog I loved more than anything as a child to young adult was killed by a wild boar - tusk straight into the lungs.
The same, by the way, applies to vegetarian stuff. The amount of critters being killed to keep them away from the veggies would probably shock you, especially in the rather inhumane way its sometimes done in industrial farms. Shooting, for some baseline, is considered one of the most humane ways of dealing with large pests.
I simply see nothing wrong, at all, with eating meat. It's a natural and normal part of life and also, by far, the easiest way to ensure you hit all your necessary nutrients without going overboard on calories - especially if you live an active life and/or are into things like weight training.
Murder is also part of the “circle of life”, whatever that may mean, given that it’s pablum that means nothing. As is disease.
We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.
That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.
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> It's a natural and normal part of life
So is dying of smallpox.
Wikipedia:
> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.
Completely natural, and completely normal.
That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.
The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.
Ease cannot be used to ethically justify an action. But even so, you ignore that, according to research, people who eat meat have worse health than people who don't.
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Look up Sepp Holzer on YouTube, or really any permaculturist that eats meat. They treat their animals well, but also eat them. I think it’s healthy to feel a twang when you kill anything. It can contribute to the gratitude you have when sitting down to a meal. The native cultures seem (at least in pop culture caricatures) to have understood this.
I have a farmer friend who occasionally has to kill one of his milk cows. He names them, pets them, cares for them like a pet. It pains him to kill them, and I always know when he’s had to do it— I can see it on his face. I’ve bought some of the meat form his cows, and I was grateful for the meat, and the man who raised the cow with such care.
Past generations of my family used to name animals that they raised for meat after dishes they could end up in. There are practices people can engage in to distance themselves from the animals they interact with.
But also some people who raise animald for meat hire a person to collect them for slaughter in part because of the emotional toll involved.
As to your last question.. I think you might be confused? People don't like to kill in general. Go outside and ask people how they felt getting their first kill on a hunt as a kid, you're going to realize that a unifying element is learning to deal with harming another animal.
Bonus: being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
> being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.
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Harvesting crops is materially different from slaughtering animals, and calorie for calorie, plant-based nutrition involves less termination of life than getting calories from animals (if you're grouping insects and non-animal life into the "forms of life" being killed).
If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based, be responsible for less killing, and today do it without having to give up the textures and experiences they've be conditioned on.
It's difficult in 2025 to conclude that a person who doesn't choose to eat this way is particularly opposed to killing, in the way that you propose.
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Being against child slavery doesn’t exclude you from benefitting from child slavery when you use your phone.
I guess you should just be pro child slavery and enslaved some kids to do your housework then?
Cars kill 50k Americans a year. I guess we are just ok with killing peoplr and therefore shouldn’t be against murder either?
It doesn’t even take philosophy 101 to understand there’s a significant moral gulf between killing deliberately and incidentally.
> People don't like to kill in general.
I used to believe this.
Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties)
The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person can't protest. However, once you agree, you must come up with a name and you must follow through. You must kill this person no matter what within a short time frame (make something up like a month).
I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.
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It's different perspectives.
For a lot of people it's an exchange thing. You give the chicken a place to stay, food and care and in exchange you get to eat it when it gets old. They do bond with them but there's this understanding from day 1.
If you don't get that out of it it'd turn into an omlette so instead of turning into an omlette it gets to enjoy a large percentage of its life.
One needs to decide if an animal is a product or a pet. It's difficult to have them be both.
Having them as a product does not mean you don't care for them, on the contrary, but I would say it's a completely different type of bond.
> But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
I would argue it's about the purpose, not the bond. You don't kill a pet, but you do kill food. And you should never kill for the sole sake of killing.
> but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land
You needed HN to figure that out? I assume this is obvious sarcasm but almost none of the domesticated animals species would exist if almost all humans throughout history weren't willing to do that.
Even eating dogs was perfectly standard in most more "primitive" and/or destitute societies.
My wifes family was wicked as they would let the children bond with the animals, without letting them know they gonna be dinner.
She tells a story of a wonderful pet goat. Until one day it was "gone to another farm", and they enjoyed goat curry for dinner.
The older siblings knew... and now they dont talk lol.
I grew up the same for much of my childhood tho it was never hidden or explicitly stated all the time. I bear absolutely 0 resentment about any of that tbh. I just fed the chickens, petted the goats, waved the bees away from fruits and helped pluck the chickens
In the end it makes me feel like the people eating their nuggets but have a traumatic reaction to what created them are the odd ones.
My friend would spend summers at the family farm, and the youngest kids would be issued a rabbit as a pet for the duration. They'd then make the kids watch the rabbits be slaughtered and cleaned, and serve them up at the end of the vacation...
Straight psychopath approach to child raising. The adults were all convinced this is how you made kids grow up tough
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Or why should the "bond" cause us to not eat animals? They aren't pets we eat in a panic, but animals we raise with the intention of eating but still bond with them and continue the process through consuming them and letting the animal go on to fulfill a higher purpose of providing sustenance to the humans they bonded with.
> Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
I love my chickens and I'm really sad when I lose some to predators. Yet I have no issue to harvest them for eating. They are not pets, I raise them for eggs and meat.
Maybe it's because I was raised on a farm, but I make a difference between pets and farm animals and that does not mean that I don't have a "bond" with some of the latter.
The first step is to acknowledge that there is something wrong here. This categorization of "pets" and "farm animals" as different sets is completely virtual. In real life, both are just animals.
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Why should they "bat an eye" about killing animals raised on their own land? It's how we've lived since the dawn of time. Death is a part of life.
If you think it's wrong to kill animals to eat, I would ask you "By what moral standard?"
This argument would be valid if humanity would continue all practices it has done "since the dawn of time".
We have dropped some practices and we continue with some. We no longer leave the dead to rot, we bury/burn them, and so on. We developed religions, science, etc, and we are in a different era now, our lifestyle has completely changed, we don't have to hunt, don't have to build our own shelters, and we are no longer nomadic.
I am of the opinion that `killing animals` is a practice we can safely stop now, it was a necessity at that time, but right now it is completely optional.
There are various angles to look at this. One is sustainability and another one is morality.
Sustainability: Do you think we have enough animals to feed 8 Billion people on earth meat daily? I hope you know why we had to fallback to agriculture as a source of nutrition. Why most early settlements were started on river banks?
Morality: My moral standard is: Don't kill animals for my own sake of pleasure, kill only what's necessary for my survival, kill only what is there to kill me/hurt me.
So can I "kill" plants?: Yes (Using the term 'kill' wrt plants is just wrong, but I will continue with it for the sake of argument).
How is it morally okay to kill a plant but not okay to kill an animal?:
Let's agree on the definition of an animal. By animal, we all mean the set of (humans, pets, goat, horse, pig, lion, etc), there are no plants in this set. They are in a set called `living_beings`, which will have bacteria, viruses, insects as well (who can be further clubbed into smaller sets). Now my moral standard is "Not kill animals" (Not 'don't kill living beings'). It is on this entire set, not selectively for X or Y, which will be hypocritical. I am applying the same level of morality to everyone in this set. Now coming to plant-based food. First of all vegetarian food is not just plants. It is fruits, vegetables (akin to fruits), seeds, leaves, and other different parts. The plants are not always "killed" unlike when producing meat-based food (except eggs). The plants are "evolutionary hardened",i.e. built for harvesting, they don't die if you pluck a fruit (moreover they drop it naturally). They don't die when you take a flower or take a bunch of leaves (as long as you are within limits). The same can't be said for any animal.
Is the use of pesticides, deforestation, and killing of insects/rodents okay for producing large amounts of vegetarian food?:
No, I am against that but I don't see any other alternative to feed the calorific needs of 8 Billion people on earth. Of course there are other farming practices but they can't be commercialized or don't have high yields. As much as we can, we should try to eat locally sourced items to avoid carbon emissions due to transportation over large distances.
So what will be my ideal world that is according to my moral standards?: Ideally, everyone has a backyard where they can grow their own plant-based food. If you want better nutrition coverage, keep some chicken and eat the eggs. Let the chickens enjoy their lives, doing chicken things.
Will I eat an animal if I am stranded on an island with nothing else to eat?: Yes, at my current level of ego, I would prefer to stay alive by killing and eating the said animal.
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> I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals
You develop bonds, just different ones and you learn to place limits because you know what the purpose of the animal is.
I still felt it when I was really little, but that was gone by the time I was a teenager and the reality that this was our living set in.
> Chickens are very sweet animals
My father asked for, and got, a chick for Easter once.
It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family. Only my grandmother, who had grown up on a farm, was willing to go into the yard.
> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
A friend of mine complained to me a few years ago that the people in the apartment next to hers were raising a chicken. The crowing woke her up in the morning. But she consoled herself that soon enough they'd eat it.
I was pretty amused at the whole idea of raising a chicken inside an apartment.
Check your local regulations. Keeping roosters (adult male chickens) in many city areas is actually illegal; i.e. against the byelaws. It is considered antisocial because of the noise that they make and the early hours when they make it. i.e. literally "at cockcrow"
If only it was only the early hours. The damn things scream pretty much all the time. I've had two neighbors over the years that accidentally kept roosters.
So, if you want to keep backyard chickens, save yourself the trouble and get the red sex linked chicks. They are hybrids whose color is very reliably determined by color, so you can be pretty sure you aren't getting a rooster chick.
It's either that or brace yourself for the process of turning the occasion young rooster into fried chicken before it gets too obstreperous.
> It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family.
When I was a kid, we also had chickens and roosters around. At one point we had a smaller, white rooster who would take any chance he could at terrorizing the family as soon as we brought them food.
Unfortunately for the bully, we also had a second, bigger rooster, who would keep an eye on him, and come running to beat his ass and chase him away as soon as he spotted nastiness.
The white bully ended up in the soup. The grey defender died of old age.
My friend had a racist rooster who abused the brown chickens and got along with the white ones.
He traded it in for a more "woke" one.
I grew up with backyard chickens. It was great, but youre missing one downside: the smell. Chickens shit a lot. Also, the predator thing is understated. You don’t just need defenses, your defenses are likely to fail. If this happens, you may wake up to the sound of your pet being mauled to death and your yard covered in feathers.
The two-decade war between my Dad and the local foxes cannot be understated. The chickens are fully enclosed, naturally. They currently have a (completely buried) overturned concrete igloo under their feet. There’s a dual perimeter fence, the outer one is regularly coated in all manner of larger mammal’s urine he buys online. Team Fox is currently tunnelling to map out the concrete igloo, convinced there’s an opening. They’ve gone full mole.
With some distance it’s quite amusing, but it’s claimed a large part of his life, being the obstinate bugger he is.
Pea gravel. Lots of pea gravel in the holes. Blow it in with water.
You can't tunnel in pea gravel.
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That's awesome. My father has been waging a similar war with the coyotes in the woods behind our farm for maybe 5 years now. Your foxes sound way more intrepid though, the coyotes here haven't tried burrowing, yet...
My neighbor has chickens and the predators are no joke. Raccoons constantly trying to weaken their coop, weasels always ready to slip into any little hole, hawks and other birds of prey circling overhead. They've lost a lot of chickens despite keeping a close eye on them and trying to keep a very sturdy coop. It's like a signal goes out to all the wild animals "COME GET TASTY CHICKENS HERE!" Of course we are in a pretty rural area. You can get some pretty cute fluffy chickens though.
Tell them to get a farm dog or two. That’s pretty much the only working answer to predators on a farm.
We're a bit rural but still too tightly packed for farm dogs. They've got a regular dog but it doesn't have quite the free rein a farm dog requires to keep chickens locked down. Kind of the worst of both worlds as far as the chickens are concerned.
That was my problem with backyard chickens. The raccoons are too clever. They never got into the coop, but they were persistent about weakening the run, and eventually learned our schedule for putting them in the coop for the night, and got up early to beat us to it. Chickens are a tragic pet just because absolutely everything wants to eat them.
I lived with backyard chickens for a time. It‘s surprisingly hard to keep predators away. These animals are clever and very determined when it comes to a freely presented meal. After all, better enclosures also give chickens no means of escape.
Yep, this is a problem right here. Once something does make it in it's a massacre.
> - You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
I visited a farm as a kid and we had fresh chicken for dinner one day. They had one of those orange road cones with the top cut off a bit to fit the chicken in upside down so they could easily chop off its head. They then run around for awhile after that because their nervous system is still working for a minute or so. Just something to interesting to learn as a 5th grader, I guess.
> Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent.
They did tests on chickens, and apparently they understand the concept of showing restraint on a current action, with the view on having a larger reward later.
Something along the lines of: "If you don't eat these grains now, we'll reward you with twice as many grains later".
That's something that dogs can't do, for instance.
Maybe the dog just values immediate reward higher even though it understands it could get even more later? How would you control for that?
> it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution
Does this also take into account the current price of eggs in the same product category? i.e., organic, free-range eggs?
For current Erewhon prices, 8 eggs a day is $11.30 in free eggs a day, so $339 in eggs a month?
https://erewhon.com/subcategory/33022/eggs - $16.99 a dozen
I'm not who you're replying to... but: it cost me $2-2.5k to build my coop two years ago which houses 5 hens, and they cost roughly $10-20 per month to feed, change bedding, etc. Realistically my household eats 4 dozen eggs a month. Even with current egg prices I'm not saving any money for a long, long time.
Still absolutely worthwhile for my mentally though and one of my major life goals
>I'm not who you're replying to... but: it cost me $2-2.5k to build my coop two years ago which houses 5 hens
These numbers are absurd. You need a wooden box and some chicken wire, and chicks cost less than $1/bird. I don't understand why this always comes up on HN, where people are spending thousands of dollars on chickens. It's the simplest animal you can possibly own and they should pay for themselves almost immediately.
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Your first egg is $1000. After that, Free Eggs! Except for the feed, and the work.
Free range isn’t that much space still. Pasture raised is better and at my local grocery store I can get a dozen for like $8/dozen.
Erewhon is probably THEE most expensive place lol
Yeah, using erewhon to gauge price of anything isn't going to yield anything good. Well, it will reveal how much people willing to overpay to avoid seeing "poor" people.
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it
I didn't notice a significant difference in taste either. Eggs taste like eggs, it is one of the foods where there is the fewest difference between home grown and store bought, and also between different grades of store bought. And if there is any difference, I think that freshness is more significant.
One big difference, though it doesn't matter much when you eat it is the shell. Good quality eggs, including those from backyard chicken tend to have a stronger shell that breaks cleanly.
Maybe if you give your chicken specific food, your eggs can have a specific taste. How you feed them can affect the color of the yolk, which can matter for presentation, but it doesn't tell much else.
Chickens are really smart and curious animals. They can also learn from each other new behaviour, like eating unfamiliar food, or hunting for small animals (the cries of joy from our cock once he finally got a frog!!!) They also have really marked personalities, once you spend some time with them.
> a large coop
It's large compared to the average, but the longer we've had chickens the more we're convinced they thrive better when given appropriate space (anecdata about average age of our chickens vs all other people with chickens we know), leading me to think something like yours is still too small even for 2 chickens.
For us the minimum is now such that there's at least some of the gras/moss left throughout the year instead of the puddle of mud we used to get. Plus I'm not gonne lie: seeing their (and their ancestors) behavior 'in the wild' it feels morally/ethically better as well. Especially the younger ones are keen explorers: easy to see when let ranging free - they'll go in a radius of like 100m around their nest, but not much further than that. Apart from that one mandatory weirdo obviously.
The one I built was definitely too small on all accounts (coop space and run space).
For the second coop, we bought a pre-built shed that's about 8'x12' (much taller and roomier than the first), and even that is starting to feel too small for 13 chickens with all their various items. They have a much larger run now, but even that still feels like it might not be enough for them!
Definitely it's not about the cost and convenience.
And I haven't seen it discussed much, which tells a lot that the HN-ers are city dwellers with little experience in the countryside life. But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit.
Animals produce shit and lots of animals produce loads of shit. And chickens don't have the notion of "this area is for eating, this one's for shitting", they will shit all over the place. So if you don't enclose them and can run to your porch, they'll shit it up so gotta be careful where you step or sit on. If you enclose them, better be prepared to wipe shit of your boots coze no way you can avoid it forever. Then the "pleasant" activity of cleaning up loads of shit from the chicken coop and dispose it somewhere.
Overall, having lived on a farm, my childhood memories of interaction with animals resume to "lots and lots of shit everywhere" :)
At the backyard scale it’s not so bad. My neighbor just mixed it into a big dirt pile that we all use for fertilizing our flowers and shrubs.
> But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit.
Yes. I volunteered at a Raptor conservancy. Fantastic animals and being trusted to help fly them in a display was one of the best things I've ever done. It made up for all of the poop cleaning. At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey - it reduces the poop volume and the pellets dry into hard nuggets that easy to pick up (and fun to pull apart later). Black Kites were okay-ish - most of their poop ended up on easily cleanable wall sheets behind their (outward facing) perches. But vultures. yeech. They are fascinating from a social perspective and some were very playful - pulling on your bootlaces until they were knotted, for example, but their poop is gross and voluminous. They also can use defensive projectile vomiting if they feel threatened, which is as (un)pleasant as it sounds.
But overall, great animals to be around.
> At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey
As soon as somebody showed me this as a kid, I would constantly be looking in pine groves for pellets. There was something fascinating about pulling them apart and finding the little mouse bones. Whenever I have a chance now, I point it out to kids. Some of them are fascinated like I was, some of them can't understand why I showed them something dirty and boring <shrug>.
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My mom has a dozen backyard chickens and I agree with all of these. I'll tack on two bits from my own experience:
Good: Fresh unwashed eggs don't need to be refrigerated. They are perfectly safe at room temperature on the shelf for days.
Bad: You can't leave them with other pets without supervision. One of the dogs got himself a taste for chicken and already ate at least three. You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately. I had to put down one poor chicken that was deeply injured but still alive. We constantly stay vigilant to keep the dogs and chickens separate.
> You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately.
Speaking from experience, I can say "Yes, you absolutely can train this out of a dog." However, it is not easy and it is only marginally more easy if you start at a young age of the dog. Furthermore, there are breeds that have no interest in chickens at all, anyway. LGD may actually even protect them.
Depends on the nature and breed of the dog too.
My GR goes into livestock guardian mode whenever the rabbits are free roaming in the garden (even though he's a bit scared of them ever since one bit him on the nose), but some dogs, terriers especially, will just instinctively chase and kill a rabbit.
I assume it's fairly similar with chickens.
Totally fair. Unfortunately this dog is a 4 years old black lab and we don't have the capacity to train him out of it. We manage it by keeping him indoors when we let the chickens free range in the yard.
Lots of countries don't wash their commercially grown eggs (and have a much lower % from factory farms), which greatly improves shelf life in shops etc.
Yes. It was quite a culture shock to see eggs stacked up in the middle of the aisle in Mexican grocery stores. I also find that, in general, Mexican store-bought eggs taste better and have a much darker-yellow yolk.
Iirc, it’s only the US and Japan that acid wash their eggs, thus stripping the natural protective layer, and require refrigeration.
I used to get tipped in eggs by this wonderful human at a bar I worked at and while I'm not sure I could tell them apart in a blind taste test I can say that the variety of pretty colors the egg shells came in and the richness of the yolk combined to make them noticeably more satisfying. I have a lot of experience tasting things though, I could absolutely see someone having a similar experience to mine and chalking it up to a superior taste. Or maybe there is a regional component to basic grocery store eggs and I live in a high quality zone, idk.
> I used to get tipped in eggs by this wonderful human at a bar
As someone who lives in a country where tipping culture doesn't extend to bars, I was imagining something quite different at first
The ancestors of chickens used to eat our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years, so I have no issues with eating them as much as I want.
For me the biggest downside is that they reliably attract vermin. I tried a bunch of things to deter rats but they were ever present when we had hens
You want a rooster, too. A rooster will also keep predators away.
> - I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
I eat fresh laid eggs very rarely (though have been thinking of raising my own), but can confirm that every time I've had truly fresh chicken eggs the taste is notably superior.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken
Looking online on reasons to euthanize chickens, it seems to be about not prolonging their suffering when ill.
I don't really know much on farming practices, and I'm not commenting to say that things should be one way or the other. However, I do note that with a human, euthanasia is not a common practice, specially without consent, and one would typically just numb the pain until they pass on their own, i.e. hospice care.
Maybe that's not possible with animals because chickens can't really communicate on the effectiveness of drugs...
Still much better treatment than factory farming.
Some other downsides:
- The smell… Chicken crap is horrible. Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies.
- Bye bye garden… My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite.
- Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
If there's a smell then the coop isn't being cleaned enough... simple as that. Ours coop is cleaned every day or two and there's zero smell.
It's like a cat's litter box. If it smells, then clean it more often.
> - Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
The research done was mid at best. They just went "oh yeah there was huge variance in the hobby chicken PFAS data so we took the average". Most of the hobby eggs had little to no PFAS in them.
Furthermore, because of privacy laws, they weren't allowed to know where the eggs came from. They say they found no correlation between PFAS contaminations in eggs and known high PFAS areas but that's actual bullshit if you can't look at location data.
It's absolutely attrocious they were allowed to publish like this and that no one called them on their bullshit.
Overall, unless you are in a place where you know you have high PFAS concentrations, it's most likely fine? You could send off a few eggs for testing to make sure, that's a 200 euro test or something. Do that once per year just to make sure and you should be OK.
Where?
Purportedly the Netherlands, but the research was badly performed.
KNOWN PFAS contamination was around heavy industry, and yeah, if you live near those regions, maybe don't. Otherwise proceed with scepticism and/or some testing.
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Everywhere that is never tested. How do you know for sure you are on good soil, and that no contaminated soil was used under your house and garden, which no doubt were levelled before construction started?
This includes feed. Commercial animal foods literally contains waste, such as plastic, due to waste food recycling not being required to be unpacked.
Sure, you _can_ control these things, but more often than not, people don't. Semi commercial hobbyists don't have the money.
We used them to manage the garden. It much easier to put down nets/steel wire around problem areas, then it is to clear out weed and insects, and the chicken bring their own fertilizers to the mix. They are also great at managing grass lawns.
There were several lessons that we learned. Chicken will find dry earth to use as a bath. If one do not want that then you need to remove access and solve the underlying need. They will also dig up seeds and eat seedlings, so any fresh worked soil need to be covered/restricted. They also eat some fruits and herbs, but not others.
In term of total work they did save a lot of time and the garden was in much better shape than before.
I also read something saying that roads are one of the biggest sources of microplastics, with tyre wear, and that being next to one (as most suburban houses are) significantly increases the amount in microplastics in foods grown in backyards. I imagine Chickens would be worse as pollutants tend to accumulate as they go up trophic levels.
Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life.
Traditionally it's done by decapitation. Head dies instantly. No need to suffer. Body runs for a while. Don't forget to ask for forgiveness...
If you properly dislocate it (thus severing the nerve) it doesn't even get to twitch. In theory it's slightly cleaner and better even for the chicken.
It does require a bit of technique though, and the consequences of not doing it right at first can be very upsetting.
That's what cervical dislocation is. The cervix is the neck. You're dislocating the head from the body, via the neck.
AFAICT, biologists didn't screw up and give two different body parts the same name. Neck bones are called cervical vertebrae.
> Don't forget to ask for forgiveness
And thank them for their help and for providing you with food.
Right! The first egg our chickens laid cost $500, the second $250, etc. It would take a lot of laying for the cost to come even close to grocery store prices (back then) but we quit after a couple of years.
> - Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
This made me smile very wide, thank you for sharing :-)
Great points! I agree with everything you said here with exception to the point about it not being a monetary solution. I've built an "extremely" janky coop for almost no cost in the past. At one point I got absolutely sick of eggs because there were so many than I ended up trading neighbors for other goods. The whole thing ended up making/saving me a ton of money in the end. Let me reiterate how unsafe this coop was however... it was as spacious as it was dangerous (very).
"If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them."
Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.
Raising animals to eat for meat is a very different endeavor than raising them for milk/eggs. Especially if you eat meat daily (or more than once a day!), do some mental math on how many animals you'd need to sustain yourself.
Not to mention, raising meat chickens is sad. We've bread them to gorge themselves so they bulk up fast. That results in essentially morbidly obese chickens. We ended up with two on accident and they couldn't even climb the ramp into the coop after a few weeks. The just gorged and sat around in the dirt. It was very sad. Raising non-meat chickens takes a lot longer and the meat output is much lower.
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It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Anyways, one buck and 2-3 doe rabbits can give you something like 300+ pounds of meat per year. Close to a pound a day would be sufficient for most people. Of course you aren't going to eat only one thing, so you will have other sources of meat for variety
Do you know anyone where this has been the case?
Yes, I know people who raise chickens for dual purpose. There are entire breeds of chickens that are dedicated to dual production.
* gestures to most of recorded history *
Before the industrial revolution, 80% of us worked the land, most familiar with animal agriculture.
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Seems to me another downside is the increased difficulty in traveling. As in, if I want to go away for a few days, I'll have to find someone to feed and water the chickens.
Sounds like a classic case of -not the cheapest option, but definitely the most rewarding-. The ethical aspect is a huge plus: knowing exactly how your eggs are produced and giving the chickens a good life.
> not the cheapest option, but definitely the most rewarding
It's not that much more expensive if you were to compare with store-bought eggs that actually match the quality.
>I'm told the eggs taste way better
Can confirm. My dad's cousin is a little bit country and has had meat and egg chickens for years. She comes to visit sometimes, and always brings eggs. Store-bought quite literally pales in comparison, which is to say that the dandelion yellow yolks of store bought eggs have nothing on the rich, flavorful orange-as-a-child's-drawing-of-the-sun yolks from her eggs.
My dad used to have around 15 chickens — but then a fox somehow burrowed under the fence - which was buried in the ground around 20 cm - and slaughtered them all.
You make no mention of feed cost. Do you just depend upon free range "pecking" in the grass, or kitchen scraps... or what? 13 chickens is a lot of daily feed!
I view the feed cost as being the yin to the egg production's yang. I'm not keeping a spreadsheet, but I do believe they produce more value in eggs than they ingest in feed.
In the warmer months, they also supplement their food from the yard when they eat a lot of grasses and fruits
My sister has been keeping a coop in her backyard for over a decade now. She got the, because “I find the sound soothing.” (It really is quite nice)
One other advantage is that they will absolutely hoover up the ticks out of a yard. I’ve tried to talk my various friends who move upstate into getting some for this reason… but yeah it’s a couple grand up front and a new hobby.
> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again
Whenever someone mentions how unique you can be with language and come up with amazing unique sentences never uttered by anyone before...I shall think of this
I also own chickens. Before I got them I thought chickens were pretty stupid animals and wasn't particularly fond of them, but I liked the idea of keeping them for eggs and some entertainment.
I've had mine for about 6 months now and they've totally won me over...
They're far more friendly and intelligent than ever I imagined. Mine love hanging out with me in the garden. One of them is very affectionate and will sometimes decide to sit on my shoulder and is happy to be held. They're all totally different and have very unique personalities which I didn't expect. Their personality will depends a lot on the breed of chicken you get too and some are much more tame than others so it's worth thinking about the type of chicken you want.
I've trained mine to come to me when I whistle which can be super useful when I need to get them back in the run. Obviously you can't train them like dogs, but they're surprisingly smart and will learn things.
They've very curious animals. Mine like to fly up onto my window sill to watch us in the kitchen which is quite sweet.
They'll eat pretty much anything so they're very cheap to keep once you have your coop built. I have 3 (getting a 4th soon) and it's costing us about £3 per month for their feed which makes up about half of their diet, and for that they'll give us about 60-90 eggs. I wouldn't get them for the price of eggs though. If you want to give them a good home it's going to cost you. They're also quite a lot of work. I need to clean mine weekly, feed them daily and provide them general care. Buying an automatic coop door is a good way to reduce some of the hassle of having to let them out and shut them in every day.
I don't eat mammal meat, but I do eat chicken and fish and its been hard for me to eat chicken recently. I'm trying to reduce the amount of chicken I eat in favour of eggs.
Thanks - that's amazing that you have reduced your meat consumption, I really do think we need to take more responsibility and care about animals more. This video converted me, may offer some insights for you too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
The concept is kind of analogous in many ways on if one should have solar power to hedge against power outages. I.e definitely can be worth it but will take up time and investment with long payback period.
To hedge against increasing electric utility prices, maybe. I installed solar recently and the cost of batteries to cover a decent power outage didn’t make sense to me. I just got a transfer switch and a portable propane generator instead. The battery tech / price is just not there yet IMO. And in case this isn’t well known, when there is a power outage and you don’t have battery backup, the solar generation shuts off — you’re not using solar AS the backup in most cases unless you have a very particular setup.
> the cost of batteries to cover a decent power outage didn’t make sense to me.
Are you trying to power your whole house during a power outage, or just a few necessities like a space heater, a few lamps, and maybe a hotplate?
Thanks for the detail. I never thought about vet needs for chickens. How would you know they are sick? I know with my cat, her mood and activity would shift. Is it apparent when a chicken is sick?
You can kinda tell based on their actions (sometimes). We haven't really needed to bring them to the vet for illness, but once for amputation of an infected + hurt toe. Additionally, if they get parasites (typically mites), they need anti-parasitics. My wife has done a ton of research into identifying chicken issues so she is always on the lookout.
We've had other times where one might appear a bit sluggish, but then the next day are back to normal. Probably ate something bad?
There are several conditions that have visible consequences, such as injuries, malformations, anomalies or a general affectation of their appearance. Plenty of those can be quite disturbing for someone with no experience.
Storey's Guides are a good starting point: tohttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/storeys-guide-to-raising-ch...
The eggs do taste better but that depends on what you are feeding them.
You don't have to eat your chickens, it’s up to you.
predators and rats and avian flu are the tough problems.
How does one travel/vacation if they have chickens? Are they self-managing enough to be left alone for 1-2 weeks a couple times a year?
With room, food, and water, we have left chickens on their own for 2wks. The challenge is keeping clean water and food and predators. We had 30 gallon buckets of water with nipples on the exterior, and food towers (home made). They had the entire interior of our barn.
I wouldn't leave them in a small coupe without a run for that long.
Your hypothetical children may tell stories for decades about how they were the ones who had to scoop the poop into the outdoor composting area and that the strong smell of urea lives with them to this day.
uh, speaking hypothetically and not at all of our own family chicken adventure when I was a kid/teen.
Also, if you have to kill a chicken, study how to do it and practice beforehand. Botching it will also live with you - I learned this one the hard way.
All that said, I'm glad I had the experience of (helping) raise chickens. It was an adventure, and the eggs were great. I've pondered it on and off again as an adult but have thus far resisted the temptation.
> - Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
Isn't the more likely case that they shit everywhere but the family loves them so much they won't let you put it back outside?
A big upside; with chickens you have the best possible composting system. They will eat almost all food waste. (but, please be careful to avoid the small number of foods which are unhealthy for chickens) And, they turn that waste into compost. Depending on volume, they can also completely handle leaves, grass clippings, and other yard waste. For leaves, they love to scratch through them and will poop on them. They'll break down the leaves in record time.
Ignorant question: why might one need to euthanize a chicken?
I think typically as a solution to serious injury (e.g. result of a predator attack or otherwise) that can't be mended.
In my case, we had too many roosters and their competitive/protective behaviour was causing serious injuries to the hens, so we had to make the tough decision to reduce their numbers. Being in the middle of nowhere, there weren't many options for the rooster in question, so it seemed like the most humane thing to do at the time.
"Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses"
This one is something I think people maybe don't consider. My brother has chickens, they have a coop but pretty much have the run of his property in a rural area. He has had to kill a coyote and a bob cat so far. Not a reason not to get them, but something to consider before doing so.
> Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and can become quite tame. They can purr.
Chickens are ruthless and will not hesitate for a moment to kill and then cannibalize their coop mates. The best way to avoid it is to have a single breed as they tend to start by attacking anything different, literally spots or discolorations, on other birds.
Yes, chickens will eat other chickens.
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them.
All eggs taste the same. Which is great because eggs taste great.
> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...
Chickens are filthy animals and the thought of having one indoors is disgusting.
You write in absolutes when talking about your own opinion as if it's generally accepted to be a fact, which makes even interesting looking bits look suspicious when you encounter something clearly biased.
Cannibalistic behavior in chickens is not an opinion: https://extension.psu.edu/poultry-cannibalism-prevention-and...
It’s one of the reasons factory farms clip the beaks.
And regarding egg taste, have fun reading this: https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs
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good luck with this
how hard would it be to break even with 200 chickens in a typical European town (excluding land costs)? i am just imagining if a small company decides to raise its own chickens-eggs for lunch time...
"We can't build a bigger coop - Joey's going into soup."
Inside the house? How? They shit wherever they happen to be ...
I’ve hear another downside is the sheer amount of poop to clean up.
you mean free fertilizer to gather and use.
> - Chickens are very sweet animals
Personally, I find them rather savory. Although deep fried with a bit of honey is good too.
Did you find out about hacker news from Reddit?
> Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent.
I hated chickens, the only animal I may have disliked more were sheep and that’s only because sheep are so unbelievably annoying.
Chickens to me were nothing more than noisy garbage disposals.