We have been keeping chickens at Camp Pleasant for about a year and a half. We started with about a dozen beautiful hens, who grew up happy. When full size, we realized our coop seemed a bit small (even though most chicks are probably given much less space). So, we started to simply open the door and let them roam free, during the day.
There were a couple of problems with this "wild and free" range practice. One, they don't give a rats ass about wildflowers, and will dig up a perfectly good, rare wildflower to get at a bug. And two, they get picked off by racoons, and foxes.
Racoons turned out to be some special predators. Even when we stopped letting the chickens out, the racoon returned, and figured out how to climb a fence, pry netting from fence, and open a latched door. By the time we got our chickens secured again, and caught the racoon, we had lost 5 chickens.
So, last year, when a friend had some extra "pullets" (teenage chickens), I brought some home to join our flock. I made the assumption that all the chickens would be laying hens... But we ended up with 5 roosters. Five roosters is way too much for a confined coop, and they soon started to terrorize the hens. Our beloved laying hens became victims of an onslaught of abuse and straight up gang rape. We could take it no longer.
There were a couple of problems with this "wild and free" range practice. One, they don't give a rats ass about wildflowers, and will dig up a perfectly good, rare wildflower to get at a bug. And two, they get picked off by racoons, and foxes.
Racoons turned out to be some special predators. Even when we stopped letting the chickens out, the racoon returned, and figured out how to climb a fence, pry netting from fence, and open a latched door. By the time we got our chickens secured again, and caught the racoon, we had lost 5 chickens.
So, last year, when a friend had some extra "pullets" (teenage chickens), I brought some home to join our flock. I made the assumption that all the chickens would be laying hens... But we ended up with 5 roosters. Five roosters is way too much for a confined coop, and they soon started to terrorize the hens. Our beloved laying hens became victims of an onslaught of abuse and straight up gang rape. We could take it no longer.
That's me, Brian, on the left, holding the first chicken that we killed. It was the most aggressive...a fact that I thought might make me feel better about killing it. We tried to keep the "best chicken", but when it came down to it, deciding who gets to live and who has to die transcends reason. Fact is, you are killing something that doesn't deserve it.
It helps to have someone like Rob (at right) around, who has some experience, who grew up eating fresh chicken, and who can help keep people cheery, even when their hands are covered with blood.
I'll spare you all the bloody pictures taken during the kills, but share this picture because I think it does a good job of showing the reality of slaughter...not only do you kill a living thing, but you immediately "process" it into something you can eat. Here we are busy cutting, plucking, soaking, and gutting two roosters.
Several hours later, we have fried chicken, and Sean takes his best shot at gnawing through the tough skin of a year-old rooster. The meat tasted amazingly GOOD, although it was very chewy. We had fried chicken for several days. It was an interesting feeling, to go to work with lunches of meat that I grew and killed.
I've been everything in terms of eating: vegetarian, vegan, raw (ok, for only a couple weeks), freegan, and localvore. Now, I'm somewhere in between localvore and freegan...although we all buy more crap than we'd like to admit. This experience definitely made me question meat eating. But more to the point, it made me question my domestication of chickens altogether.
We like things to be replinishable and sustainable, and we LOVE eggs and chicken manure. (Chickens are undoubtedly some of the most helpful creatures for the small farm/homestead.) To keep the chicken flock alive and going, we need at least one rooster to fertilize the eggs, and when those eggs hatch, we get a mix of sexes, and end up with too many boys to maintain a healthy population of laying hens. I cannot see a way around the death of the young boys to keep the girls happy. Of course, this is an insane line of logic, and so I am led to question the entire paradigm of domestication of this species. Is there a way to keep laying hens, and to hatch your own chicks, without killing roosters? Or is domestication problematic from the get-go, and something we should steer away from? Or does the consumption of these animals make sense?
I certainly don't have the answers to these questions, but I am glad that I am surrounded by people who pose and consider them, together.
It helps to have someone like Rob (at right) around, who has some experience, who grew up eating fresh chicken, and who can help keep people cheery, even when their hands are covered with blood.
I'll spare you all the bloody pictures taken during the kills, but share this picture because I think it does a good job of showing the reality of slaughter...not only do you kill a living thing, but you immediately "process" it into something you can eat. Here we are busy cutting, plucking, soaking, and gutting two roosters.
Several hours later, we have fried chicken, and Sean takes his best shot at gnawing through the tough skin of a year-old rooster. The meat tasted amazingly GOOD, although it was very chewy. We had fried chicken for several days. It was an interesting feeling, to go to work with lunches of meat that I grew and killed.I've been everything in terms of eating: vegetarian, vegan, raw (ok, for only a couple weeks), freegan, and localvore. Now, I'm somewhere in between localvore and freegan...although we all buy more crap than we'd like to admit. This experience definitely made me question meat eating. But more to the point, it made me question my domestication of chickens altogether.
We like things to be replinishable and sustainable, and we LOVE eggs and chicken manure. (Chickens are undoubtedly some of the most helpful creatures for the small farm/homestead.) To keep the chicken flock alive and going, we need at least one rooster to fertilize the eggs, and when those eggs hatch, we get a mix of sexes, and end up with too many boys to maintain a healthy population of laying hens. I cannot see a way around the death of the young boys to keep the girls happy. Of course, this is an insane line of logic, and so I am led to question the entire paradigm of domestication of this species. Is there a way to keep laying hens, and to hatch your own chicks, without killing roosters? Or is domestication problematic from the get-go, and something we should steer away from? Or does the consumption of these animals make sense?
I certainly don't have the answers to these questions, but I am glad that I am surrounded by people who pose and consider them, together.
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