hello yes chickens are cool and i love them

so I'm not going to launch into details right away because said details are incredibly depressing, but I've been reading about commercial laying hens. :( I think it was @taxonomicAtrocity who said a while back that he could rant indefinitely about that industry? anyway, same. it's really terrible. >:(

 

Both the meat and egg production industries are really messed up. And chickens aren't the only ones. Problem comes from the fact that our current idea of "modern" farming is actually from post World War II mechanization; we were so gung-ho about automation and technology "mastering nature", but then it didn't work out that way, but by the time we realized it, the industry was already suck too deep in the cost, both financial and cultural. People are trying to raise animals and plants the same way they build a car on an assembly line. Except these are living things, and living things don't work that way, so you end up with sick animals that have to be blasted with antibiotics from the second they leave the womb or risk destroying your whole flock/herd, monocultures that fail without constant input of synthetic fertilizers and environment destroying herbicides and insecticides, heavy fossil fuel reliance, and a whole system teetering on the edge of economic and ecological collapse that the industry tries to wring one more good season out of.

 

one time i walked into the glasshouse to see a chicken sham dustbathing in straw.
sham dustbathing is usually a result of an animal needing to dustbathe but being kept in a barren cage or whatever.
in this case, though, the chicken was about 50 centimeters from a large amount of dustbathing spots, where i'd seen chickens including that chicken dustbathing before.

it had just. decided to try to dustbathe in straw. straw that was surrounded on three sides by dust and on the other side there was a wall.

 

Possibly competition from the other chickens? Even if there isn't overt body language people can recognize, chickens are constantly talking to each other through posturing, sub-vocalizations, etc. If it was lower on the pecking order and other higher ranked birds were using the dust box or just near by, they might have told the other bird to go shove off or just made it feel unsafe to use the box.

 

there were no other chickens in the glasshouse.
also it wasn't a dust box so much as a large area of dry soil/dust under the big table that's in the glasshouse for...some reason.

 

Silly bird just really liked that straw then, I guess!

 

Idea that just occurred to me having watched my own chickens: even if they have a perfectly nice open patch of dirt available, I've watched my birds dig down through the grass to turn up a new pile of dirt that's cooler and more moist. I assume they just think it feels nicer than the dried out hot stuff that's sat around baking all day.

 

yeah it...it was weird?

other weirdness i've seen with chickens includes a chicken repeatedly bashing a dead mouse against soft soil, chickens climbing onto the feeder and upsetting all the hens trying to eat, hens getting out of the run and then being unable to figure out how to get back in so they just stand there complaining, and a hen trying to crow but instead making a noise that sounds like BRAWKBEK or, more recently, BRAWKBEK BEK bek.

 

maybe!

still doesn't explain why straw. there's lots of exposed dirt in the shade outside in the rest of the chicken run, so...why go into the glasshouse to dustbathe in straw??

 

Haha okay the hen crowing I know top hens will do if there's no rooster around. They just take over the rooster's job! Will even try to mount other hens some times. The mouse bashing is either to "tenderize" it (break up the teeny bones) before eating or just because they think it's fun. Could be both tbh.

 

there are two hens that try to crow. one is really good at it but doesn't do it often. the other...goes BRAWKBEK BEK bek. it sounds like she took an alarm call and tried to turn it into a crow. if i hadn't seen her do it i would've thought the early BRAWKBEKing was a weird alarm call.

 

incidentally: rooster crows, to me, generally sound kinda like AH-AHRA-AHRAAAAAAAAA or AH-AHRAAAA
so BRAWKBEK! BEK! bek is a very different sound

 

My rooster kind of sounds more like "GUR-Ga RUUUUUUR!" He's a funny boy.

 

i used to have a rooster who had a really weird gait-he had a sort of falling-forward strut, and when he wanted to go fast he hopped like a kangaroo. he was like that when he got him, his hips were weird. he did a two-part crow, not a three-part. he was a tiny white bantam.

whenever we got other roosters (eggs hatching into roos, getting them as part of a bundle deal sort of thing with some hens, buying two chicks that both turned out to be roos), he was top rooster. that resulted in the hilarity of a tiny little white bantam with a messed-up tail (the neighbour's dog got onto our property and got his tail-just the feathers, but they never grew back right) hopping up and down in front of this huge acurana rooster.

 

I don't unfortunately have chickens, but where I'm from there are a ton of wild ones, and a lot of them tend to have really long/strong legs! They range from chilling in the forest-y/park-ish areas to like...the beach? And I was wondering like...why the beach. is it prime chicken real estate??? the forest-y areas seem so much more sensible! they're not even TAN chickens!

 

i know certain species of junglefowl eat things out of tidepools p regularly, and i wouldn't put it past feral domestics to figure somethin like that out! there's lotsa noms 2 be found on the beach, plus sand, which is good for bathing. plus plus whatever people leave about that's good 4 eating.

 

exciting news: i'm getting four more chicks! (not for a couple months, mind, and they're from a hatchery so not very good quality, but who cares tbh)

tentative chick plans as of now are a buff orpington, a salmon faverolle, a blue cochin, and a speckled sussex. 8)

 

Yessss good choices!

 

@taxonomicAtrocity what constitutes "good quality" in a chicken, pray tell? ...for that matter, where can you get chicks aside from hatcheries? pls educate me, I am ignorant.....

 

specialist breeders, i think, where you can get them like you'd get a well-bred puppy
as opposed to a hatchery which is like a pet store