Eat fewer eggs, watch prices drop.
Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
411–420 of 879 posts
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#412Lol, now you also get to raise livestock because you can't afford the food. Capitalism really is the "monarchy by money" speed run. Welcome back, peasant.
Hint: the answer to the headline is "no", which means it should not have been the headline, but that's clickbait for you.
Growing your own food costs time and resources. People are attached to the (copious) amount of leisure time they have today.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong. They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multi…
It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones.
It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#414As 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…
> - Chickens are very sweet animals Personally, I find them rather savory. Although deep fried with a bit of honey is good too.
Did you find out about hacker news from Reddit?
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#415As 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…
> Chickens are very sweet animals My father asked for, and got, a chick for Easter once. It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family. Only my grandmother, who had grown up on a farm, was willing to go into the yard. > Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again..…
> It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family.
When I was a kid, we also had chickens and roosters around. At one point we had a smaller, white rooster who would take any chance he could at terrorizing the family as soon as we brought them food.
Unfortunately for the bully, we also had a second, bigger rooster, who would keep an eye on him, and come running to beat his ass and chase him away as soon as he spotted nastiness.
The white bully ended up in the soup. The grey defender died of old age.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eggs have obvious health benefits. Land encroachment + emissions is modest, and notwithstanding, that's just something to manage, not avoid altogether. Everything we demand for ourselves encroaches on land.
It doesn't take much of a search to find many strong contra arguments to your reply. https://www.peta.org/features/egg-industry-cruelty/
Judging from the headline (I'm not going to read PETA), this is about the issues pertaining to the wellbeing of chickens, not the other externalities I actually mentioned.
Land use for animal agriculture has shrunk over time in the US. Methane is highest for cows, not that high with chickens. With the right practices (admittedly, they aren't migrating the clocks to fertilize land) this could be carbon-neutral, but notwithstanding, methane does not persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
With “it’s better for yourself” I’m not just referring to nutrition. Animal agriculture is devastating for the world, including the environment around you. Also I think for most (dare I say ‘well informed’) people it would be an ethical relieve to stop consuming eggs and other animal products. And yes: there are (nutritional) concerns around eggs; for example concerning salmonella, cholesterol and saturated fats. Alt…
Modest egg consumption has a negligible impact on cholesterol. Most blood cholesterol is produced by your liver, impacted far more by other variables. Eggs are also not that high in fat.
As I said: science is not unanimous regarding that, but I think my other arguments are more important.
And personally I don't care about the debate around the nutritional value of eggs. I just avoid animal products because I don't want to contribute to the hell that animal agriculture is.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#418Wow! I wondered about this article - US centric. I wondered because eggs are not expensive here. I just looked [1] [2]. I can get a dozen free range for about US$4 at the current conversion rate. They are a supermarket own brand, but even the "fancy" ones are something like that for 6, but some are actually still close to $4 for 12. The US chicken market (not necessarily eggs specifically) was in the Morgan Spurlock…
Yeah even in the US its somewhat regional and brand-specific. In my region, I just purchased a pack of 18 eggs for $5 USD at a typical well-known chain grocery store.
Some of these egg companies are absolutely using the bird flu as an excuse to raise prices. Right next to that 18 pack I bought was a shelf full of eggs that cost $9/dozen. No one was buying them. Just a weird situation.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others". I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.) One myst…
Everything loves a chicken dinner. Unless you live in a city where the predator population has already been driven out, you are faced with the decision to either let them free roam (and accept a small but steady rate of predation) or keep them penned when not under direct supervision. There's not a third option.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#420Earlier 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…
> 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 and the mortality of actions.
There's something missing from this analysis. Namely that animals that have many offspring generally expect most of them to die and this is part of selective pressures that keeps the population healthy. If, for example, a mouse could reason morally it might still let many of its weaker babies die because keeping them alive would not be good for mouse-kind. It's inappropriate to assume that the child rearing morals of a low-fecundity, high-parental-investment species like ourselves applies to other species with different reproductive strategies.