Clucking fascinating!

[Lilith]

Errm sorry, mods, joke intended!

But after trying to post more photos last night after a busy day and going into meltdown because technology and me are not good friends, and waking up grumpy, despite a zillion things to do, I got sidetracked by this -

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=hen ... &FORM=VIRE

Absolutely nothing to do with cats - chickens. But since we, and our cats, usually eat so much chicken, and this video was so good, I'm posting it. It's an hour long and chiefly focused on a battery hen rescue...and one guy who started life as a battery 'hen' - and changed sex!

Brings back memories of my own hens I kept on an allotment half a mile away.

The time a hen gazed meaningfully into my eyes and as I thought affectionately - and then pecked me, right in my eye. 'Oooo a nice big black wiggly centipede!' Hens peck first and ask questions later.

The times they helped me to dig .. I'm amazed I never decapitated anyone.

The time a neighbour asked me how eggs could be produced without a cockerel. I explained that an egg was the result of ovulation and didn't need a male to fertilise it. Parveen's face was a picture. 'Ugghh! You mean an egg is a ... PERIOD?' Well, it is ... bon appetit!

It's also like a birth. I once spied on a laying hen and she had proper contractions until the egg appeared...every day!

Yes, and they are messy. I spotcleaned every day and 'bottomed' once a week. No s**t on my eggs! And they were delish! My only regret was that the cats don't eat eggs. what a great source of protein - and largely organic; every bit of waste greens (along with proper hen pellets and grain)and most weeds went to the hens - and what came out the other end made wonderful compost. Not just greens either - the gruesome clip of a hen swallowing a mouse faster than a snake does is perfectly true, as I found the time a poor mouse drowned in a water bowl and I laid it on the ground for a minute...a nano-second. Grab!

Miss them. Happy days.

[Crewella]

How very useful - we're about to start keeping them! Thanks Lilith!

[catslave16]

Yeah, thanks, Lilith (sarcastically). I sometimes feel a bit queasy when eating an egg - yeah, it's a hen's PERIOD!! but a hen eating a mouse? Ur rgh!
When I was a child my family had a summer house on the coast, and we used to get food from local farmers ("You want carrots? Well, you know where they are" the farmer would say, and you'd go into the field and pull them out of the ground. Sometimes we had chicken for Sunday dinner. The hens would be scrabbling round the yard, my mother would point out the one she wanted, the farmer would catch it with a stick with a hook at the end, chop off its head, pluck it, singe it, and open it up. He'd get all the nasties out but what fascinated me were the unlaid eggs in the uterus. They were yolks, from the size of peas upwards, and there might be a dozen. He'd put them in a paper bag, and they made really intense tasting omelettes. Once I had an egg that the hen must have been just about to lay, as it was full size and had a shell. But the shell was soft - and stayed soft, even when exposed to the air.
Aged six or seven, my sister and I watched the chicken slaughter quite unmoved. We used to keep the feet. When you pulled the tendon it made realistic clawing movements, and you could scare little kids smaller than yourself with them. Children can be unfeeling little *****, or maybe we were just much closer to nature then and more realistic. The older I get the more squeamish I become.
But to get back to CATS: when I grew a little older (eight) I found the best thing about visiting the farm was that it had a number of sheds that smelled of creosote and were dim and stiflingly warm inside, and among the hay bales there were always, ALWAYS litters of kittens. Aaaaaahhh... My mother never allowed me to have one though. She wasn't an animal lover.

[bobbys girl]

How very useful - we're about to start keeping them! Thanks Lilith!

We keep toying with the idea. Yes we will, no we won't. I am worried about the cats chasing them, but we have friends with chickens who are used to cats and take no sxxt. Also they are ENORMOUS chickens - that'd give Purdy a run for her money.

Catslave - once on a farm holiday we were allowed to let the chickens out in the mornings - with a word of caution to duck as we opened the door. If you didn't you got a face full of very angry cockrel. Now that would REALLY give Purdy a run for her money.

[Walesgang]

I have a flock of 11 girls and Boris our boy!

They are a mixed bag of size, age, colour, rescue etc.

I volunteer for BWHT on local rehome days - very rewarding!!

I would highly recommend keeping them to anyone with a space in their garden they are willing to give to some girls. Love mine nearly as much as the gang!!!!

[Lilith]

Ohh, Crewella and Walesgang I'm so envious! I still miss my chooks (sadly left the allotment 8 years ago) and now only have a Coronation Street style backyard which is geared to cats and (in warm weather) a royal python. Bobbys girl I wouldn't worry about the cats - once pecked twice shy - it hurts! Boundaries would soon be set up, ohhh and home-laid eggs are gorgeous, well worth the hard work, although the chooks are so fascinating it doesn't seem like work. Every day I'd get up at 7 and walk over to the allotment to be met with croons of pleasure as they waited to start the day. A hen is always cheerful.

Lol Catslave - me too! I grew up in a rural area and 'played' (the farmer had a young son and had asked us over but pity the guy, with a pack of kids underfoot) on a proper old-fashioned farm with EVERYTHING. Pure Alison Uttley, it was - I was lucky. Ten years later it became a bloody housing estate. I helped to feed calves, picked potatoes, rode on the horse...also watched a huge turkey having its neck wrung. I was 7/8 - shouldn't have been allowed really. Cats as well. I wasn't allowed a kitten either. We had a new posh house on another bloody housing estate and the farm was somewhere to escape to.

I remember the chicken foot at school - a lot of the kids were from farms and brought in a chicken foot, arrgh creepy lol!

One of my very first memories is my Irish Grandad's hen run. 'White Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds'. My mother has less idyllic memories - she used to have to 'draw' ie disembowel chickens he'd killed and hated the eggbound ones with all those little yolks. In Spain they make a special soup out of those yolks, never tasted it, but read about it (I think) in a book of Maura Laverty's - a superb writer and cookery writer.

Oh dear, I could go on - but I won't

[Lilith]

Just been re-watching this video and another memory.

The time I found a place selling point of lay hens quite near me. I went over on the bus with a cat carrier...the guy wouldn't let me NEAR the henhut. So I left without chickens and very cross. A while later a fellow-allotmenteer bought a load of these hens from the same place, and I've never seen a poorer, scruffier load of hens in my life...with hindsight this seller was 'rescuing' battery hens past their sell-by date 'old boilers' (lol, I'm one myself) getting them free and selling them on at top POL prices - they weren't going cheep!

So anyone looking to buy chickens, beware of sharp practice (or should that be practise) like this.