As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…
Thanks for the detail. I never thought about vet needs for chickens. How would you know they are sick? I know with my cat, her mood and activity would shift. Is it apparent when a chicken is sick?
Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
351–360 of 879 posts
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only tech heavy if you decide it should be though.
I tried the low tech version first, and one night forgot to close the coop and brother fox killed all the chicken. Also chicken are not particularly smart, so switching on light to lure them in when it’s getting dark is very useful.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try making nuggets from scratch. It’s so good and easy to do. Chicken tenders from breast meat. Egg seasoned with salt, pepper. Dunk into seasoned breading. Dunk into egg again and back to the breading. Pan fry. Yummy.
You're still going to come back to a child who's learned "Real chicken nuggets come in dinosaur shapes, are very salty, have a uniform breading, and don't require teeth to chew". He's going to think your dish doesn't quality.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#354Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
what are they dying of? I assume it isn't weather. I was shocked when my Wisconsin coworkers said their chickens handle -10F weather no problem in the winter.
there's just a pile of things. usually reproductive -- becoming egg bound, etc. there's parasites, viruses, bacterial infections. and being flock animals, they hide it, too. yeah some varieties of chicken are remarkably tough around cold which is crazy considering their original tropical origin.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harvesting crops is materially different from slaughtering animals, and calorie for calorie, plant-based nutrition involves less termination of life than getting calories from animals (if you're grouping insects and non-animal life into the "forms of life" being killed). If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based,…
Less termination of life based on numbers or some version of (sentience * number of individuals)? I find it hard to believe the sheer number of individual insects killed during harvest could match the killing of one cow, calorie for calorie. Also, what if we increase the calories of the animal we choose to slaughter, say we start raising massive whale-sized animals instead, would that tip the scales?
However, do keep in mind that a large proportion of agricultural output is used to feed animals.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imports?
Good point. I didn't imagine a lot of egg imports happened.
In the years since, they would export. Egg whites stayed in the US, and egg yolks would go to Europe. American consumers don’t want yolks.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you demonstrated that eggs taste different, but not better. My 2 year old would only prefer to eat frozen chicken nuggets. That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
eggs are homogenous in nature, so a blind test between two eggs can reveal the superior quality of one type of homogenous product. Especially when it is an egg, which is entirely "natural" a chicken nugget is not the same thing as whole chicken, because it has many chemicals, additives, flavouring agents, msg, organ meat, etc and is then battered or crumbed and deep fried before being packed. It also has a different…
What I wanted to convey is just because kids have a preference for something doesn’t mean it is better. So more a flaw in the syllogism.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try this then: every animal eats other living things to survive. We have been doing it for a billion years. Is a basic drive built into it DNA. After that, is just a question of which living things you are going to eat.
The key difference between humans and every other animal that has ever existed is our ability to reason about systems and the morality of actions. Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems…
People generally dislike gratuitous pain and cruelty, hence we're seeing a push for cage-free hens and the like. They don't oppose slaughter in and of itself.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People don't like to kill in general. I used to believe this. Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties) The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person c…
But why? You can easily come up with a whole list. I’d ask for a week to perform research on more names I wasn’t aware of. There’s so many bastards in this world I’d specifically choose a less sharp weapon for and skip the can’t protest part. The only thing I’d worry about is getting physically exhausted and mentally unstable after such marathon, but it has to be done.
But then there's the question on whether you could trust your own judgement.
E.g. I wonder how many people would choose Kim Jong Un without realizing how EXTREMELY progressive the guy is on the scale of the hell hole that is North Korea.
Allowing just anyone who wants access to the countrwide intranet with some curated and heavily censored information from the outside and ending the crackdown on user generated content? Blasphemy! Allowing a selected few foreign restaurants to open up? Witchcraft! Building semi-normal housing in the prison camps you toss entire families together with their children, grand-children and elders in? Cracking down on systematic rape and arbitrary mass executions in those camps? He's going to come for our (prison) children next! Trying to shut down the practice of high ranking officials forcing young girls into sex slavery squads? And even after inflicting an "undisclosed physical ailment" on him, he still only barely agreed to restart the squad, controls the selection of girls himself instead of allowing us to force anyone we like into it, requires parental consent, makes us wait until the girls receive an education and doesn't recruit anyone under 14 anymore? SCREW HIM!
And many other things that seem absurd to us and the Juche system for exactly opposite reasons. Like allowing other countries but China and Russia to offer work in their special economic zones, agreeing to a meeting with the US President at the border inside NK, considering negotiations with South Korea and allowing very limited cultural exchange, giving some priority to increasing living conditions for anyone but those who have the priviledge of living in the capital, turning a blind eye to tiny private markets selling some less controversial contraband, ....
The guy is just barely holding on in a system that completely vaporized anyone with even but a tiny bit less than utmost loyality to the Juche ideology. For several generations. All institutions, government bodies, civic organizations, education and corporations are under complete control of Juche extremists. And then there's this one basketball obsessed fatty raised in Switzerland.
His greatest achievement so far is probably opening up their intranet to about a quarter of their population (less than 1% were allowed to use it before him) and slowly expanding the group of people who have access to the outside internet. At this point more people have access to smartphones than to television or radio. And now social media and chatrooms are apparently being reopened after the previous government took those from the 0.1% elite who had access to the intranet back then in 2005, because they organized a spontaneous sport event with a few hundred people.
And not long ago the NK government became very worried about people accessing the global internet through their intranet enabled devices, extending the application used to connect to the intranet with spyware trying to detect foreign network accesses. So it seems VERY likely to me someone hard to stop is currently hooking their intranet to the global internet in the background. And the NK establishment is not very happy about it.
Maybe the life of North Koreans will become much better within one or two generations.