Silky looks dead– but he’s just asleep in the sun! All our chickens have been enjoying the summery weather this week.
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(Photo source.)
From Craigs List in Orange County, California:
FREE Mean-ass chicken
I have a lovely Buff Orpington hen available for free. She just started laying; I believe she’s about 7-8 months old. She can’t stay here as she’s really aggressive with people. I’m getting tired of fending off her pecks when I open the coop door to feed my flock. Since I let my hens free-range in my yard with my kids an aggressive, people-chasing, biting chicken is not working for me. Know what I’m saying? Even though she probably deserves it, I don’t want you to eat her. Just give her a home and wear gloves when you collect her yummy eggs.
(This one, too, comes from Sue.)
Two of our chickens, a hen and a rooster, snuggle up together in a cage for the night. The cage is not closed, they can come and go as they please, but it seems to make them feel safe. (Especially with the new puppy running around!)
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All chicken farms are not created equal. Above, our chickens munch weeds in their yard, enjoying the abundant sunshine. Below, a “cage-free” factory chicken farm.
Our chickens give us eggs and (sometimes) meat, as well as a great deal of pleasure. When the dogs aren’t out, they can free-range in the back twenty. They give us more than enough eggs for ourselves, so we sell the excess to our neighbors– that pays for their feed.
The eggs you buy in the grocery store are likely to come from chickens living in conditions like the bottom photo– or worse. Many chickens live their entire lives cages so small there’s literally no room to turn around. And this is just one example of how the “meat industry” treats its animals. Little wonder vegans avoid animal products on moral grounds– and that animal activists put a measure on the California ballot to outlaw the worst of these practices. And, despite extensive lobbying by corporate farmers, the measure passed with 63% of the vote.
Most of the eggs, meat, and dairy products offered in grocery stores originates in confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. That means when we buy these products, we’re supporting abusive practices that would make most of us pale if we saw them.
But that’s not all. CAFOs produce huge quanities of manure which are typically slurried rather than composted, producing an enourmous amount of greenhouse gas. They rely on industrially-grown grain, which uses fertilizer originating from fossil fuels with the attendant greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, and water pollution. Nothing about the animal industry is pretty, except the little white styrofoam packages they package meat in– and even those don;t recycle on most municipalities.
“So what’s the alternative?” you ask. “I can’t exactly keep a hen for eggs in the backyard of my home here in the city.”
Actually, you probably can, Chickens are easy to keep, and many cities permit them. (Roosters are typically not allowed because they crow.) In Los Angeles, for example, according to one source, there’s no limit on how many poultry you can keep in your backyard. In San Francisco you can keep up to four. In New York City, chickens are considered pets under the health code. In Houston you can keep up to 30, and in Salt Lake City up to 25 if you obtain a permit. Check with your local health office– there may be requirements for housing and how far they must be from a residence. But in many instances you can keep chickens– and far more humanely than the factory farms that now produce your eggs.
There’s a bonus, too: not only does the typical chicken lay six eggs a week, but chickens are friendly, they eat weeds, they’re good mousers, and they provide fertilizer for your garden plot. You do have a garden plot, right?
This past weekend, we decided that we’d sold all the turkeys we were likely to. The remainder, four toms, were destined for the refrigerator. I’ve never butchered a turkey before but fortunately you can find instructions for about anything on the internet. Bbum’s blog had the answer. It’s not a task I enjoy, but that’s how meat gets from barnyard to table, and I’m willing to take that responsibility. (It does, however, cause me to eat less meat than I otherwise might.)
What’s the difference between a cage-free bird like ours and a conventionally-raised bird? For starters, ours get to run around at will and eat whatever they find (in addition to what we feed them). A conventionally-raised bird gets about 3 square feet (about 20 x 20 inches), barely enough to move around in. With such close quarters (there are 7,000 to 10,000 birds in a barn) the conventionally-raised turkeys must be pumped full of antibiotics in order to prevent disease. Our birds, on the other hand, have never had an anitbiotic of any kind.
Free range birds are not the same as cage-free. A free range bird may get as little as 4 square feet in an enclosure that’s moved around a pasture. He or she grazes on grass and insects, but still has limited ability to move around. So cage-free is a far more humane way to raise a turkey.
And the taste? Store-bought doesn’t come close. This was the best-tasting turkey I’ve ever had.
Cage-free turkeys command as much as $7 per pound in some parts of the country. Sadly, people here in rural Utah don’t appreciate locally-produced meat to the same financial degree: there isn’t much of a market for cage-free heritage-breed turkeys. We had saved a tom and a hen for breeding, but subsequently decided to sell them to someone else. We’ve got plenty going on here; we’ll move on and focus our attention on goat cheese instead.
Our turkeys love noises– music, cell phones, chainsaws, engines, aircraft overhead… Here. Suellen teases them with her cell phone, and they respond. All of them gobble at the same time. They’re quite amusing.
Four toms a’strutting… Beautiful, aren’t they? They puff up to impress us (and the hens). The more excited they get the bluer their faces become, until they turn purple around the eyes.
Puffed up and strutting like a bunch of adolescent boys…
During the day, we let the turkeys go where they want– and they do. Now that they can fly, they roost on top of the barn or even on the roof of the house.
We were concerned that our outside dog, Pepper (who once killed one of our cats), might bother them– but she leaves them alone. Here, four turkeys roost on her doghouse. She shooes them away if they stand in her water dish, but otherwise lets them do what they want.
Our Narraganesett turkeys continue to grow in size, and the toms’ foliage gets ever more impressive. Here, the largest tom struts his stuff.
Their faces are quite bizarre: blue “war paint” on a red background, with a part of the wattle that hangs down over the beak. They’re also very social. They don’t like to be picked up, like the chickens do, but they follow us around like puppies.
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