Pros and Cons of Backyard Chickens

Somehow or other, it is just about the symbol of twenty-first hundred years metropolitan hipness to keep a couple of birds out back. We're mostly speaking hens. Exact volumes are unavailable, but the trend has become popular enough for a large number of major towns to revise their pet animal ordinances, thereby opening the legal floodgates for the emergence of urban creature agriculture, an endeavor that a lot of American metropolitan areas legislated out of existence (mostly for health reasons) back in the nineteenth hundred years.This renaissance of foodie devotion for the uber-local egg has also inspired its talk about of outlandish rhetoric. Says the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin: "Chickens are actually bringing us mutually as a community." Says my Austin neighbor and co-owner of Boggy Creek Plantation, Carol-Ann Sayle: "Everyone should have their own henhouse in their own yard."It's doubtful that the incoming mayor of NEW YORK will agree with either of these sentiments. But no matter. A large number of other urbanites nationwide--many of these so committed to keeping hens that they are doing so surreptitiously--are out of the blue giving a major cluck about garden eggs.Lost in all the enthusiasm will be the drawbacks. Regarding to Ian Elwood, of Dog Legal Defense Account, "the solutions backyard chicken farming seeks to create--food security, local foodsheds, healthful eating--are all better served by stimulating more plant centered farming." His important thing regarding urban agriculture is simple: "Let's leave animals from it."Here are some are five explanations why, as it pertains to birds, Elwood is onto something.1) Diminishing Production. Hens start laying eggs after about five weeks. Development, however, wanes at age two. Hens can live for more than ten years. Many backyard hen owners are as reluctant to keep a non-productive hen as they are to carefully turn her into fowl soup. The upshot has been a sharp climb in abandoned parrots. In 2001, based on the Associated Press, Minneapolis' Hen Run Save fielded six cell phone calls from individuals seeking to find homes for forsaken birds. By 2012, that number come to almost 500.2) Commercial Hatcheries. Raising hens in the garden seems as an obviously humane option to factory farming. In a few ways, it is. However, upon this point, two tightly related facts is highly recommended. First, the majority of hens fortunate enough to escape the factory's battery pack cage hail from the same industrial hatcheries that supply factory farms with millions of wild birds. This commonality not only undermines any pretense of convinced that backyard birds task the industrialized position quo, but it leads to another problem, namely the actual fact that the man chicks blessed in those industrial hatcheries were likely either tossed alive into a grinder or gassed. Male wild birds are worthless to a hatchery offering egg farms. Household hens might be glorified, but their adorable fowl brothers are cared for like trash.3) Predation. Backyard hens are specially vulnerable to predation. Try this test: when you learn a friend gets backyard hens, check in two months later and have how things 're going. It’s likely that good that the solution will go something like, "great, but . . . ." Dogs, felines, snakes, coyotes, possum, hawks, raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. These predators are common and persistent as well as your poor hens, the methods you have come to love as pets, cannot indulge their natural defense mechanisms (such as finding a minimal tree limb hidden in dense foliage). They often find themselves captured in some Ritz-Carleton of any coop that ended up being less secure than advertised and, in their plush safe havens, are wiped out in a way that makes the slaughterhouse seem to be like a day spa by comparison. "What wiped out my hens?" It's an all too common question. And there are 23,900 answers being offered on Google.4) Roosters. There's in regards to a 5 percent chance that your hen will grow to be a rooster. There are a couple of known reasons for this mistake. For just one, the sex of a poultry is hard to identify upon beginning, even for experts. Many roosters are accidentally identified as hens and sent to feed stores, where urban farmer/hipsters flock to buy their stock. Less innocently, many male parrots are tossed into delivery containers as a form of packing material, deployed to avoid the hens from banging into the aspect of the cage and having their retail value decreased. Regardless, urban ordinances that do allow hens are markedly less accepting of roosters, who are generally considered poultry non-grata in urban settings.5) Cost. First-time garden hen owners are enchanted by the idea of free eggs. Avoid being fooled. Build the coop, buy the feed, pay the veterinarian, count the hours spent keeping the coop and administering care, compensate the neighbor's child for nourishing the hens when you go to the Hamptons for the weekend, and then get a calculator. The results? As you back garden farmer from Merced, California told an online poultry message board: "Don't notify my wife, but I believe my eggs are costing about $40 a dozen."