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Chickens in Trees

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Re: Chickens in Trees

#111

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

globular-toast wrote: post #76
thinkingemote wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sibling comments to this are truthful, we wouldn't be vegetarians but I think we would be eating more vegetables. When I was vegetarian in my youth I visited my grandparents in the country and asked them about killing animals themselves. They did have relationships with their animals and didn't enjoy doing it but its what they did. I think if you ask modern animal farmers today they would say they do not enjoy ki…

I think you are closer to the mark. People don't seem to realise they didn't eat meat as much back then. Like not even 10% what people eat now. To sustain the amount of meat consumption today they would have been killing every single day! In fact, it was common for families to have one pig which they'd kill around Christmas time. The pig was fed waste food (leftovers, vegetable peelings etc). They ate the entire pig,…

> they would have been killing every single day!

Wut? A quarter of a steer provided my family of 3 with beef for an entire year. A quarter!

Re: Chickens in Trees

#112

Post by tbyehl »

oooyay wrote: post #93
tomcam wrote: post #34

I made the mistake of buying chickens as livestock. I fell in love with the day-old chicks the moment we got into the car to take them home. Plan was that 1/3 would become food, 1/3 would die of disease, and the remainder would lay eggs. Unfortunately I lost my taste for chicken. We lost 1/3 due to predators, not disease, despite building a $20,000 chicken run. I was depressed for months. And I have been through some…

A $20k run?! Please tell me about this. My run and coop are maybe $1k total.

Are you not on any chicken social media groups? If you're paying someone else to build something with, uh, curb appeal — fully painted, metal roof, nice hardware — $20k is real easy.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#113

Post by globular-toast »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #111
globular-toast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are closer to the mark. People don't seem to realise they didn't eat meat as much back then. Like not even 10% what people eat now. To sustain the amount of meat consumption today they would have been killing every single day! In fact, it was common for families to have one pig which they'd kill around Christmas time. The pig was fed waste food (leftovers, vegetable peelings etc). They ate the entire pig,…

> they would have been killing every single day! Wut? A quarter of a steer provided my family of 3 with beef for an entire year. A quarter!

Yeah but you didn't only eat beef, and people choose the same cuts over and over (like chicken breast).

Re: Chickens in Trees

#114

Post by globular-toast »

_heimdall wrote: post #87
globular-toast wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more people would be veggie if they had to kill the animals themselves. You just wouldn't do it unless you were really hungry, which I doubt anyone on this forum has experienced even once.

We processed and butchered our first two pigs earlier this year. Its not for the feint of heart, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. We raised them from a few months old (we took them from a farm that was having to close) and did the entire processing and butchering process ourselves. The meat is night and day better than what you can buy in a store, the bacon is delicious, and we know the animal lived…

"Processed". Did you personally see their "near instant end"?

There is a very humane way to kill mammals actually: inert gas asphyxiation. A pig will happily enter a chamber full of nitrogen and die peacefully. If you arranged that then it's commendable. Personally meat is nowhere near important enough to me to go to such lengths, though.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#115

Post by oooyay »

tbyehl wrote: post #112
oooyay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $20k run?! Please tell me about this. My run and coop are maybe $1k total.

Are you not on any chicken social media groups? If you're paying someone else to build something with, uh, curb appeal — fully painted, metal roof, nice hardware — $20k is real easy.

Ah, I'm not social media apart from forums. I do watch a lot of coop and run builds on YouTube though. With that inspiration I bought a bunch of tools and am in the process of revamping my stuff to fit more with our house. It has the added benefit of making the chickens more a part of our little microecosystem as well since much of it is geared towards collecting their waste and pine flakes to make into compost. Even with all the tools added in I'm probably only at $2-3k.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#116

Post by culi »

Narishma wrote: post #109
culi wrote: post #13

The argon tree (as in the argon oil in your shampoos and soaps) is also known as the "goat tree". Please peruse these phenomenal photos of trees completely full of goats. Everyone of them looks like an album cover for some mid-00s indie band https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/tree-goats-of-morocco-argan... https://www.google.com/search?q=argon+goat&udm=2

It's argan, not argon. And the whole goat poop thing is just a urban legend guides like to repeat to naive tourists.

Thanks for the correction. Not sure what myth you're talking about. Goats are one of the main seed dispersers at this point and overgrazing can even be a problem. Goats do also climb argan trees naturally for fruit, but I looked it up and there is an issue of herders purposefully trying to put many goats into a tree for tourists to take pictures. I'd imagine you wouldn't see a whole dozen of them in a tree like this if they're just grazing alone but they certainly can and do climb trees for fruit. Argan isn't even the only tree they're known to do this with

Re: Chickens in Trees

#117

Post by _heimdall »

globular-toast wrote: post #114
_heimdall wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We processed and butchered our first two pigs earlier this year. Its not for the feint of heart, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. We raised them from a few months old (we took them from a farm that was having to close) and did the entire processing and butchering process ourselves. The meat is night and day better than what you can buy in a store, the bacon is delicious, and we know the animal lived…

"Processed". Did you personally see their "near instant end"? There is a very humane way to kill mammals actually: inert gas asphyxiation. A pig will happily enter a chamber full of nitrogen and die peacefully. If you arranged that then it's commendable. Personally meat is nowhere near important enough to me to go to such lengths, though.

By processed I mean the act of skinning, gutting, and cleaning.

As far as the near instant end I mentioned, yes I did see it. I pulled the trigger myself, each pig dropped instantly. I wouldn't begin to claim that there is a humane way to kill anything. Taking a life is no small thing, though its a part of life it shouldn't be taken lightly and demands respect.

I had a bad experience with attempting to use gas asphyxiation to put down a baby chick that was suffering. It didn't go well unfortunately, and though I'm sure with just the right setup it would work really well, I don't have such a setup.

While we're on this subject, though very out of place for HN, I've never personally agreed with the idea that death can be humane. It seems to be a relative comparison if suffering from a third party's perspective. We never really know what one experiences when they die, we only know what we see and what appears to be suffering. We similarly assume that plants don't suffer when killed, frankly I just don't buy it. There's plenty of research showing communication between plants, why couldn't they feel pain or loss? Do plants truly not feel anything, or are they just so different from us that we don't recognize any signs if pain or suffering?

Re: Chickens in Trees

#118

Post by ars »

adrianN wrote: post #81
b112 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was not. It was common to spank your children, out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done. We now view this as wrong, but that wasn't beating them. Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common .

Okay, I believe my argument is not hurt by replacing the word „beat“ with „spank“. Adding that physical punishment was done out of love strengthens my argument, I think.

The change is spanking is not because spanking is harmful but because the world doesn't need it. The environment people are in is much more gentle, so it's not necessary to raise children that can handle large amounts of adversity.

We also don't teach our kids to defend themselves against sword attacks, for the same reason - it's no longer necessary.

Your argument implies that the past behavior was bad and we should change it, but that's incorrect. The past behavior was correct for its time. If someone would have raised a child without spanking 100 years ago they would end up with a weak person who could not live in the real world, this would be a bad thing.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#119

Post by ars »

Galatians4_16 wrote: post #85
chrisco255 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even 3 generations ago, it was incredibly common for people to slaughter their own farm animals. My grandmother was an old farm woman, raised in the time before refrigeration. She'd slaughter and pluck her own chickens without a second thought. It's entirely a modern phenomenon of global distribution and modern conditioning that lead you to that conclusion. Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they ha…

Just think of how much the environment would benefit if we wouldn't need to run so many refrigerators to eat fresh food…

It would not benefit at all. Zero. It would harm the environment because all the food waste outweighs the energy cost of refrigerators by several orders of magnitude.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#120

Post by [deleted] »

culi wrote: post #116
Narishma wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's argan, not argon. And the whole goat poop thing is just a urban legend guides like to repeat to naive tourists.

Thanks for the correction. Not sure what myth you're talking about. Goats are one of the main seed dispersers at this point and overgrazing can even be a problem. Goats do also climb argan trees naturally for fruit, but I looked it up and there is an issue of herders purposefully trying to put many goats into a tree for tourists to take pictures. I'd imagine you wouldn't see a whole dozen of them in a tree like this…

[deleted]
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