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Chickens in Trees

suziepetryk.com

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Re: Chickens in Trees

#121

Post by Narishma »

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…

The article you linked has a section about goats eating the argan fruit and pooping the nuts which are then supposedly collected to make argan oil. That's pure BS.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#122

Post by spetryk »

crashmat wrote: post #96
smeej wrote: post #82

> ...casting nervous glances at a rooster slowly approaching me like a Weeping Angel. > Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They [the Weeping Angels] are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back. Don't turn away. And most of all, don't blink. I know this has nothing to do with the point of the article, but Weeping Angels are exactly the wrong analogy for something approaching slowly!

I think the comparison was more based on the rooster approaching when they werent looking and stopping when they were. I can't recall any other monsters that do that.

Indeed, this is the part of the behavior I was referring to :) It's a good point about the speed though - not the perfect analogy.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#123

Post by spetryk »

dredmorbius wrote: post #78

I'm extraordinarily disappointed that Doug Zongker's seminal work in the field was not mentioned or cited: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf > Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35745880 > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830497 > And a dang compilation from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35746402 > Video: http://yewtu.be/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk >

Author here (of the blog post, not of the literary beauty you linked). This is amazing. I'll add a mention.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#124

Post by mauvehaus »

tracker1 wrote: post #17

On population control... Are they generally considered safe to eat? That's the first thing I think of in this case...

Have laying chickens that free-range, and have eaten a couple of incidental and aggressive roosters. They are immensely tougher than the typical grocery store Cornish Crosses. Soup or braising is highly recommended. Coq au vin recipes meant for store-bought chicken (nearly all of them) will need to be adjusted back to add the required cooking time to make the meat tender. Plan on several to six hours of cooking.

None of the hens have aged out of laying thanks to the efforts of the local predators. Should that ever happen, it will surely require resolving the question of whether the hens are livestock or pets before I can tell you about how the cooking process varies from a grocery store bird.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#125

Post by Galatians4_16 »

ars wrote: post #119
Galatians4_16 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms. Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#126

Post by tomcam »

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.

I didn’t trust myself so I hired an awesome dude who did a great job.

Two years later we learned mountain lions are bigger and stronger than expected.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#127

Post by ars »

Galatians4_16 wrote: post #125
ars wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms. Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.

It's better to eat the "food waste", rather than create more waste in the first place.

If I have leftover rice, I'd rather refrigerate it and eat it tomorrow, instead of feed it to chickens.

Rabbits can not eat food waste, they have very sensitive digestions. Very few fish will eat food waste (mostly just tilapia will do so).

> feed bacteria and worm waste to plants

Plants do not eat bacteria. You can't just "feed" worm waste to plants, you would have to bury into the soil via plowing or some other method.

Bacteria also make CO2 by digesting food. The fertilizer they make is minerals and nitrogen.

You have a bit of a simplistic view of how this food cycle works.

> I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.

It's not so simple. Except for metal, recycling usually uses more oil than not recycling.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#128

Post by Jcowell »

throwup238 wrote: post #100
Jcowell wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fall under the idea that yes, everything is natural, we are not special no matter what secrets of the universe we uncover and wield . Even our robot descendants , if they ever come to be, are natural too. Just because we have the ability to acknowledge material selection does not mean we are except from it

That's a gross misuse of language that makes words utterly meaningless. When people say "artificial selection" they don't mean a supernatural deity is doing it. It's like going "haha gotcha! tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!", completely missing the difference between the use of the word in a culinary versus botanical context. It's not insightful or useful in any way, it's just equivocation.

I just fall under the banner that everything we do is natural since we are natural, even if we were to desires nature it self. After all it was natural selection that brought us here.

Re: Chickens in Trees

#129

Post by HappMacDonald »

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,…

I'm curious what the old timey protein options looked like.

I know that modern vegans have a more challenging time sourcing protein.

Old time diets didn't have the same limitations that modern vegan diets do, so they could for example lean on eggs and similar options.

But if you subtract 90% of protein sources from a modern diet, they had to have been eating something to make up that deficit and I'm always in the market for possible ideas to improve my own diet. :)

Re: Chickens in Trees

#130

Post by hombre_fatal »

ndr wrote: post #46
throwup238 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems. Red junglefowl, the ancestors to domesticated chickens, only lay a few clutches annually for a total of…

One could argue that is natural adaptation. Modern chickens are likely going to be more successful at propagating their genes into the future.

You could justify any man-made breeding horror with that if it held any ethical weight, but it does not. Breeding a worse life into a sentient being isn't a victory for that being. Neither the being nor its genes should be propagated at all.
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