I love chickens! Chickens as pets and egg producers are the best use of your time and space when it comes to caring for animals. I love looking at their different colors and watching them interact with each other. They all have their own personalities, attitudes and preferences.
We have 25 hens and three roosters although I think one rooster is going to get his way with the chopping block soon. He is becoming pretty aggressive and is attacking people! He is a pretty good size so that is worrisome, we have the twins and other children always going in and out of the coop to collect eggs and heaven forbid he attack a kid. Just a note I like chickens for their eggs and personalities NOT for their meat, it makes me sad when one has to go to the 'soup pot', my husband is in charge of that task. If it were up to me the aggressive rooster would get a separate coop...but then my husband would say 'he is not doing his job- he has to go'. My husband grew up on a ranch in Mexico where the animals were their livelihood, not pets. I on the other hand grew up in the city and only had animals for pets (even rabbits). So we bump heads about this all the time, that's why it is my husband’s job to figure out who is 'soup' and who is not. When he kills the chicken he is also in charge of dressing it and finding a pot at someone else’s house for it. Don't get me wrong I like chicken but I cannot eat an animal that I have cared for and watched hatch from an egg. My husband tells me all the time that if things continue to get worse with the economy and the worlds food I will have to learn to eat those chickens... We will see...
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| That's him in the middle, see the attitude |
We started out with four chickens (1 rooster and three hens) in our backyard. I loved it because I could go to the backyard and watch them and feed them the scraps from the kitchen. After a while we had to move them because the raccoons and opossoms figured out that they were there. Poor chickens were terrified everynight. Raccoons are very smart and can figure out most primitive locks, you need to put a padalock with a key or a combonation lock on the chicken coop door. Don't leave the key close I wouldn't put it past them to figure it out... LOL
No, in all seriousness they are very smart animals and have 'hands' similar to ours.
Opossoms' well they are just opportunists they didn't try so hard to open the coop, they just would steal the eggs and try to catch a chicken and pull them through the fence.
It all worked out fine in the end becasue now I have so many more chickens- more eggs for me. I do miss the clucking and the rooster crowing, my neighbors even miss those noises if you can believe it.
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