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 can become quite tame. They can purr.
- I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
- It's fantastic to get ~8 free eggs per day (from 13, 3 are not laying this winter)
- Morally/ethically, it seems like the best way to eat eggs if you're caring for them in a loving manner (compare to factory farms)
Consider the downsides:
- You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
- Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses
- Veterinary services can be harder to find. Most vets don't want to deal with chickens. However, it also tends to be cheaper than a vet for a dog/cat.
- 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...
- If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I think there are more upsides than downsides, but you should think about these downsides before taking the plunge. Don't let it dissuade you. Overall, they have enriched our lives immensely and I would recommend it to others!
1: https://www.anthonycameron.com/projects/cameron-acreage-chic...
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 multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.
Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.
Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.
I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.
That was a nice personal discovery.
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.
People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.
I grew up buying meat and never seeing farms. About 7 years ago, I helped my sister/BIL raise a flock from hatchling to food. We did everything.
Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.
Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.
Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.
>> Nature is cruel and uncaring
These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.
That's not what "and" means
Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it. Nature has no free will or emotions or intelligence. It is indeed uncaring, because it doesn't have the capacity to care. Nature is neither good nor bad. It just is.
Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.
Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.
Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.
Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.
> Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it.
You're defining the word cruel to narrowly. Per Merriam-Webster "causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain" and Cambridge "(of an event) causing suffering". Natural forces can be cruel. So can fate and life.
You really need to define "good" in this sentence. How can nature move beyond nature?
Literally picking a fight with Nature, what a trope.
What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?
What if it is? We transcend nature and evolution because of our culture and foresight.
We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways.
Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life.
We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say.
It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.
We are nowhere near being able to live outside this planet without significant struggle. It would be far easier to live in a submarine in the ocean than anywhere else in this solar system.
Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most.
We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy.
I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious.
So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.
I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as
- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”
- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.
Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms.
(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.
What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed.
I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.
Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.
At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)
Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.
I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.
The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.
Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death.
If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
Peter Singer makes this argument in Animal Liberation, one of the seminal works on modern animal ethics. One of Singer's points is that it's ethical to eat animals so long as they are raised and killed in a way to minimize suffering.
IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.
> Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life.
But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.
I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.
I mean, it can be both.
Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.
The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.
I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.
> its not natural
Neither is using fire to cook food.
Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)
As I read their message, the point is that non-meat eaters have more problems with the unethical ways to farms than the killing itself or the process to eat another animal. Those two last points may be used in punchlines but if you discuss with the speaker you’ll ear way more about the raising condition that the instant they animal is killed.
Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.
This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too.
Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
I’m generally a vegetarian, but I eat chicken, beef, and pork from local farms that raise the animals ethically.
You're a reasonable / pragmatic vegan. Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans.
There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).
I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.
I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.
I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.
On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.
These dogmatic vegans aren't born that way - they're created by a completely unethical farming environment and detachment from farm life as /u/partition mentioned.
As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.
part of Western society ethos is our quick action within any sort of realm to "pick X; be a dick about it"
I absolutely love this characterization of modern discourse.
> Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans
I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."
Eh, not sure I buy that interpretation. Ensuring that the meat you eat only comes from ethical sources is hard, especially if you eat at restaurants, or if you eat food that other people have cooked. (Do you really want to be that person who goes to someone's house for dinner and on-the-spot refuses to eat because their host isn't sure of the provenance of the meat?) It can also be significantly more expensive. It would be entirely reasonable to decide to give up meat rather than deal with all that, if it matters to you.
And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.
I think I and most vegans also wouldn't eat it. It has nothing to do with rudeness or even the specific ethics of that situation or something. Just I wouldn't be able to physically stomach it. I would feel guilty but I wouldn't be able to eat it.
Best course of action imo is watch yourself in that moment, understand that people are going above and beyond for you even though they don't fully understand you, they are trying to accept you. I'd go to the bathroom, try to reason with myself that no animals are being killed specifically for you, the accidental touch won't give any flavour to your dish and it's all in your head. There's no ethical issues whatsoever in that situation.
If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.
Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best.
Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.
Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
> it used to be much harder to be vegetarian
Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.
I assume GP meant "... in the West". I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, and I can't imagine being a vegan, or even a vegetarian then. Certainly it would be doable if you always cooked your own food, but restaurants would mostly not accommodate you (unless you'd be fine with just a boring, flavorless salad), and if you went over to anyone's house for a meal, they'd think it was weird that you didn't eat meat.
Thousands of nations, billions of people. If only they knew the gnostic truth you hold in your breath...
To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun.
Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.
This rings more true for me. Food simply used to be a lot more expensive.
"Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1]
I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
> I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.
You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....
When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food:
Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.
Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.
This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm.
Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.
But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing.
Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?
Chicken -> poultry
Cow -> beef
Pig -> pork
That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
I always wondered about that. I thought it was just for euphemistic purposes to create more separation between the food we eat and the animal that it came from.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.
People also have been publicly maiming and killing other people for vengeance and entertainment for millennia. Morality really does evolve. That includes animals as well.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?
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 mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.
So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.
I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)
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.
We had racoons, skunks, and foxes paying nightly visits. Occasionally one would find a way into the coop and there would be a massive kill off. We got a dog, and just the scent of the dog around the coop has been enough to eliminate the skunks and racoons anyway. The fox still does come by from time to time. We had to put a net over the roof of the coop because of hawks.
Our coop is impenetrable; we never lost any chickens that way. But they would get picked off during the day by hawks, coyotes, and bobcats. One every month or two.
We've given up and are switching to bantams in an enclosed run.
Some sort of goat maybe?
Goats can be territorial, but I'm not aware of them having any particular inclination to guard chickens or livestock.
Livestock guard dogs work better, but then you're dealing with a large dog that isn't a pet and isn't socialized like a house dog.
Can't your livestock guard dog also be a pet that's socialized like a house dog? Are the two mutually exclusive?
Based solely on what I've read and experience with them when I'm on a bicycle...
Not really, because you want to dog to be bonded to the livestock, not the humans. The dog lives outside amongst the other farm animals. They tend to be more territorial and protective than pet dogs. All that said, I've seen them used more with sheep than poultry.
If your dog is hanging out with you, it's not guarding the henhouse.
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.
Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)
Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.
Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.
I know a guy who does similar. He gives the messed up parts that got damaged to his dog.
[flagged]
My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.
I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.
The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough.
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
Speak for yourself. I would never eat a cat or dog because to me they are pets, and I would feel terrible doing it.
Whatever they taste like is very very secondary to that.
I’m speaking as a human looking at the historical context of eating animals. Predators taste terrible because they are high effort, low reward in terms of nutritional value.
I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it.
The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.
[dead]
> More people will start to find...
...that roosters are total assholes.
There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.
Have chickens and they are dumber than fish. Have no qualms about eating them.
I’m from a rural area. I have formative memories of raising caring for and slaughtering animals. Hunting and fishing, literally put food on the table. I don’t remember anyone complaining that the chicken in the gumbo came from the yard.
I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.
Almost no culture routinely eats meat-eating animals. It is very easy to determine, even in ancient times, that it is incredibly easy to get sick from eating meat-eating animals. This is because predators often catch and eat diseased prey, and end up having a lot of parasites and such.
Not to mention the meat of such animals tastes much worse.
Yeah plus the whole they eat things I can't and turn it into something I can eat.
I say the smartest hunters are the farmers.
I read about these Hawaiians that would use stones to wall in an area of water but leave gaps big enough to let smaller fish in. They’d create an environment that was safe (appeared so to the fish) and provide food. This would keep most of them reliably inside the wall. Eventually the fish mature and can’t escape due to their size. And now you have ocean fish that are easy to harvest.
Dogs are hard to keep for meat at any scale. We only eat easy animals. Sympathy has very little to do with it.
> More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?
Wait until we find out how intelligent broccoli is.
Considering the bizarro world we're now living it, I wouldn't put it beyond us for it to go the other way.
If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!
The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating.
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.
> and generally were more cruel to them then we are
Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering.
In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.
That's so keenly true I wonder how we've ended up with a society where it's not only non-obvious, but even dubious, to such a significant percentage of people.
There's not really any human analogue to industrial meat factories, except maybe like Nazi concentration camps, or ... I mean really only that, right? Maybe something Genghis Khan did might occupy that same space.
Like Eazy-E famously said, it's not how you die, it's how the moments from your birth, all the way through to the end of your life in this world, add up. Do you get a positive number?
Chicken/horse born on a ranch? Yeah.
Chicken/horse/cow born in a concrete meat factory? I mean, I don't think so...
We are orders of magnitude more cruel to factory farmed animals than farming at any other point in history.
Those people were a lot more desperate for food than we were too, though.
I don't eat sunflower-seeds, as sunflowers murder one another by throwing shade.
As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden.
I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)
My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.
My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.
Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.
Depends how they’re raised… impressionable creatures. Though IME some roosters especially are just plumb mean.
A mean rooster has a surprisingly high terror-to-size ratio, and can easily draw blood with its spurs. And they carry grudges, and they’ll stalk you.
Can confirm. We used to own a mean rooster and he would certainly stalk me when he was out of the run. Not sad that a fox ate him. Would have preferred the hens not also been eaten though. Our current rooster is pretty chill and just ignores me. He even consents (begrudgingly) to my young daughter picking him up and holding him.
We used to have one around the barnyard who hated me and hated my son (maybe 5 years old at the time) and hated it even more when I was carrying my son on my shoulders.
I learned from that, and other experience of hand-to-hand combat with birds, wildcrafting eggs [1], and such, to "never let a bird see your back". I like it how those little red-wing blackbirds like to sit on POSTED: NO TRESSPASSING signs because that is their attitude. They'll dive bomb you but also flap really hard up high at the sky to nip at the wings of hawks who are lazily cruising. You might not even notice they have a nest to protect if they weren't getting in your face about it.
[1] at least seven years ago, I think...
The kinds of intelligence they display is really interesting.
They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle.
They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
At 2 years old my son could blind taste test tell the difference between my neighbor's chicken's eggs and store bought eggs.
He refused to eat eggs (still doesn't) until we convinced him to try one of the eggs from our neighbor's chicken's. He liked that egg. Every time we've tried to pass (fancy!) store eggs off to him as our neighbor's eggs he's called us out for lying to him.
He'll reliably eat eggs from the chickens across the street and nowhere else.
So yes, there is a difference in taste!
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.
> That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
My kids prefer nuggets over the whole roast chicken my wife and I eat. The salt, MSG, and seasoning of the nuggets along with the fat from the oil tastes better to them. Sadly, nothing I say will convince them otherwise.
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.
Chicken tenders are chicken tenders, not nuggets.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with nuggets. Nobody criticizes Italian meatballs, which are ground-up beef in balls. But then for some reason ground-up chicken in a different shape isn't "real chicken"?!
You’ll find the “ground chicken” in a typical industrially produced chicken nugget to be quite different than the ground meat found in a traditional Italian meatball.
correct, the "ground chicken" is much less wasteful and a more cost effective way to feed the masses with a reduced environmental impact
McNuggets are 45% meat (specifically: Chicken Breast Meat) -- at least they are in the UK, where they have to give out this information. Presumably the US recipe is at least similar.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/chicken-mcnuggets...
I'm sure there are many traditional Italian meatball recipes, but as one example, I had an AI convert the US measurements from Chef John's recipe, and it estimated 900g meat and 494g other ingredients, so 65% meat.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/220854/chef-johns-italian-...
Of course the ingredients differ in a lot of other ways than just the percentage of meat. That's just what I looked at.
Will you find it to be different?
Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"? Why are you putting it in scare quotes? The chicken breasts used to make McNuggets are literally no different from the standard chicken breasts sold at your average grocery store.
And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.
Obviously nuggets are battered and fried. But then so are traditional Italian delicacies like arancini.
> Will you find it to be different?
Yes.
> Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"?
Because when people who don't sell chicken nuggets have looked closely, they have found that to be the case.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/11/232106472/wh...
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00396-3/fulltex...
> And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.
Sure, or textured soy protein concentrate[0] to fill out the meat or soy lecithin [1] to emulsify the unholy mixture
0 https://www.tysonfoodservice.com/products/tyson/chicken/nugg...
1 - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Fully-Cooked-Chicken-...
My understanding: there actually is some difference in some cases (not saying it's true for McNuggets). But basically, a lot of time, they need special processing techniques to remove the meat close to the bone and this type of meat is then used in products that require ground meat (nuggets, meatballs, sausages, hot dogs).
Not all nuggets are ground, chick fil a nuggets I think are just a chunk of tenderloin or something. But I wouldn't call a fried complete tenderloin a nugget.
I do make fried chicken for them occasionally and I season with a bit of curry, cumin, and smoked paprika.
- 1 pack of 6 thighs or 3 breasts
- 4 tbs corn starch + 1 tsp salt + 1/2 tsp each of curry powder, cumin, smoked paprika to coat
- slice chicken thinly and use a mallet to flatten to make it even and cook faster (this also increases the ratio of breading to chicken which they like)
- coat each slice in the corn starch mix
- beat 2 eggs and then dredge the coated slices in egg
- coat the now egg coated chicken with bread crumbs of your choice
- fry in a flat pan with just about 4-6mm of oil
- about 60-90 seconds each side
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.
Going through the school system (private pre-K/K and public) was really what changed my kids' eating habits. Once they get used to the school nuggets and pizza, it's hard to "unlearn". They were more diverse eaters as young kids and ended more picky and narrow in their food choices. It's why pizza is the staple of every kids' birthday party.
I believe this is a difficult problem for schools. They need to have food that meets the standards (as they are defined), appealing enough to 6 through {age} range to have them eat it, something that can be prepared with relatively low skill demands, and something that can be prepared easily in the quantities needed with the kitchen staff provided.
That really gets down to reheated chicken nuggets, pizza, and other classic school lunches.
The alternative would be to have a school that has a sufficiently large and trained kitchen staff to prepare diverse food, make sure that the food selection that they have meets the requirements (and that the kids aren't just eating the deserts).
I'm recalling back to my school food eating days and the kitchen had four people - two serving, one cooking, one cleaning.
High school had two or three in the cafeteria - and they were constantly putting out the fast food equivalent food items. I can't even remember if there were salads (if there were, I don't think I ever ate them). [Burger, deep fried [fish, shrimp, chicken], French fries] was my lunches for four years.
Though I'm also not entirely sure that schools are to blame for the narrowing of food preference with kids. They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.
100%; I'm not blaming schools, just pointing out to non-parents how this happens. A lot of non-parents don't have the context.
The kids get used to eating it at schools and birthday parties where people go for "safe" choices like pizza.
I, too, remember in my elementary school days in the 80's, that we had real, cafeteria prepared lunches (shep's pie was my favorite). But it was also a small rural school.
> They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.
That is an interesting rabbit hole to go down...
https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2003/10/07/fussy-eating-ma...
> Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, wondered if children were reluctant to eat any unfamiliar foods, or whether they were selectively rejecting certain types – perhaps those most likely to pose a threat to heath. Early in human history, the presence of toxins within many plants made eating fruit and vegetables risky for children, while meat carried a high risk of food poisoning.
That was from 2003... article from the same author in 2005: Age and gender differences in children's food preferences - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15975175/
And the term to look for is Neophobia (related article from 2022 Neophobia—A Natural Developmental Stage or Feeding Difficulties for Children? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9002550/ )
> 4. Causes of Food Neophobia The source of food neophobia can be traced back to evolution when a neophobic attitude protected mammals from consuming potentially poisonous food. As an omnivorous species, to survive, humans had to distinguish between safe and poisonous food. Although this ability has lost its value today, it can still be observed in children around 2 years of age (sometimes earlier), when unfamiliar foods or foods served differently than before cause anxiety in the child, and a relative preference for familiar foods is apparent.
Other nations don't find it difficult. You just throw money at the problem, and the problem goes away. Like most problems.
Deciding that we need to serve food at a minimum of cost with a minimum of staff who is minimally trained according to a minimalistic nutritional guidelines, and charge children for the privilege of choosing to eat, and you aren't getting a feast full of fresh produce.
Japan is a decent model in making meals more communal and spreading the labor requirements around to students so that staff can focus on back of house work, but it starts with a higher budget basis to start with, makes meals mandatory, and provides significant subsidies.
I think it's like the rest of the school experience—your parents are the major influencers here. Our kids like what we like because we've fed them what we eat, from sardines to Sichuan to sushi. They take leftovers to school — cheaper and they don't like most of the cafeteria food anyway.
I mean, no it is not difficult, look at French school menus. You just have to not have the bad options on stock.
Kids eat better in a lower-middle-class area preschool in France than they do in the most expensive daycare in the Bay Area.
US food supply chain is highly, highly industrialized.
I visited Taiwan recently. Small island, semi-tropical with a long growing season. Stuff grows year round. Lots of markets with fresh fruits and veggies so lots of stuff is "local". The supply chain is short.
You go to even a random food stall and it can be just a few steps removed from true "farm to table".
The US is huge (logistical challenges that favor large scale, industrial food handling for economics) and many parts have short growing seasons.
In the US, the schools have Sysco and ConAgra trucks rolling up loading pallets of prepared foods. Depending on where you are, the food prep workers are contracted out to some third party private company. In my children's school -- in a fairly affluent area -- I'd guess that almost all of the food is prepared and heated from a bag.
They do... https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/24/no-more-nuggets-schoo...
> ...
> Not many schools can afford gourmet offerings like Mount Diablo’s, which also benefits from California’s year-round growing season. But school menus in several places have improved in the past decade, with fresher ingredients and more ethnic dishes, said School Nutrition Association spokesperson Diane Pratt-Heavner.
> In a national survey of 1,230 school nutritiondirectors, nearly all said the rising costs of food and supplies were their top challenges this year. More than 90% said they were facing supply chain and staffing shortages.
> The survey by the nutrition association also found soaring levels of student lunch debt at schools that have returned to charging for meals. The association is urging Congress to resume free breakfast and lunch nationwide.
> “This is the worst and fastest accumulation of debt I’ve seen in my 12 years in school nutrition,” said Angela Richey, nutrition director for the Roseville and St Anthony-New Brighton school districts in Minnesota, which serve about 9,400 students. They don’t turn away a hungry child, but this year’s school meal debt has surpassed $90,000, growing at a rate of over $1,000 a day.
> Making food from scratch isn’t just healthier, it’s cheaper, many school nutrition directors say.
> But that’s only possible when schools have kitchens. A national shift away from school kitchens began in the 1980s, which ushered in an era of mass-produced, processed school food. Pre-made meals delivered by food service companies meant schools could do away with full-time cafeteria staff and kitchens.
> ...
Los Gatos High School Hires Chef Consultant to Improve Student Meals - https://youtu.be/nMMO9fBWnjc
> That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.
It will depend on whether the whole chicken is chicken proper, or one reassembled from nuggets.
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 texture altogether, and is eaten with the hands which children find easier than using cutlery.
compare a child tasting two different varieties of dark chocolate in comparison to a milk chocolate with caramel filling, or two varieties of whole milk to chocolate skim milk, et cetera.
You are right. My point wasn’t that chicken and eggs are the same or even similar.
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.
Nuggets are mostly skin and cartilage, so maybe that preference stems from the nutritional needs of a growing child.
Where do you get this total misinformation?
You're trying to propagate an urban legend. HN is not the place for that.
What are you referring to? Sure, chicken nuggets made mostly of breast or other muscle flesh exist, but you can bet your buns the majority of frozen nuggets are mostly ground skin and mechanically separated meat.
In the United States, mechanically separated poultry has been used in poultry products since 1969, after the National Academy of Sciences found it safe.
Chicken nuggets are primarily chicken muscle tissue, end of story.
Yes they can include mechanically separated chicken, which is basically a fancy name for saying they scraped all the meat off the bones. But that isn't "mostly skin and cartilage", it's meat. There may be trace amounts of cartilage and small amounts of skin in it, but they are nowhere near the main components.
If you're still not sure, just look at the protein content of chicken nuggets. The quantity of protein can only come from actual chicken muscle. Skin has little protein and cartilage has virtually none.
There are a lot of urban legends out there about what chicken nuggets are made of. But they're precisely that -- urban legends. They're false.
https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/what-are-chicken-nuggets-...
Seriously, do you think researchers are wrong on this?
Yes, actually. Completely wrong. That "study" looked at a sample size of... 2 nuggets. And they drew totally unwarranted conclusions. It was junk science that helped to propagate the entire urban legend.
My 2 year old daughter never liked eggs. We started buying some from a neighbor who pasture raises his lay hens (and feeds them more chicken-appropriate feed).
She eats her eggs and asks for more. If we run out and I fry up some store bought ones, she refuses to eat them - even when I don't tell her where they're from.
Same goes for chicken meat from the grocery store vs. pasture raised broilers from another neighbor.
When it happened the first time it was something of a canary-in-the-coalmine situation for me.
Taste (and health) are two things the market doesn’t select for.
People say that all the time, but professional cooks have run triangle tests on backyard/farm eggs vs. store bought eggs and people can't tell the difference. At this point, I don't believe there's a difference in taste. The psychological effects that would lead people to believe that difference exists --- a kind of culinary placebo effect --- are so strong that I just attribute everything to that.
Anecdotally I have regularly switched between store-bought eggs and eggs from my friend's little farm over the last 20+ years, and try as I might, regardless of consumption method, I have yet to taste a difference. I have also asked many friends over the years if they notice any difference and all have agreed with me.
It doesn't matter though, I still prefer my friend's eggs to store-bought ones, I'd rather not support that dirty industry.
I cannot tell the difference between backyard eggs and fancy store bought (organic, free-range) eggs, but I can tell the difference between that set and industrial store bought eggs.
My expectation is that what you're tasting is the difference between a very fresh egg and an older egg; there's no doubt that's real (older eggs aren't even functionally the same as fresh eggs).
I doubt that there can be any difference in the egg whites, but the egg yolks certainly have a composition in fatty substances that varies with the kind of food used for the chicken, which should lead to noticeable differences.
While there are some taste differences in egg yolks, the taste difference in meat, between chicken that ate mostly what they had found themselves in a large area with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, and chicken that had been raised in industrial complexes, is huge.
Anecdata also, but I can compare the eggs at home (homegrown) vs. any normal restaurant around and there definitely is a notable difference in looks and taste.
That said, this applies to scrambled or fried eggs.
Omelettes not so much, as seasoning might play quite a big part, and even less with cakes, baked goods, etc. in which eggs are just one more ingredient.
Honestly, does it matter? If raising the chickens that yield your eggs makes your breakfasts more enjoyable, is physical vs psychological causality relevant? The important thing here is enjoyment of our food.
It does not matter, outside of the context of a message board, where it is of grave importance.
This backyard chicken and that backyard chicken does not have to be the same tho
[flagged]
i beg you to read my second paragraph
Not just that, unless you are eating them blindfolded or using food dye or in a more complex dish, a preference was shown to exist for pasture raised eggs. Visual stimuli is still part of the eating process and influences taste, it should not be ignored.
Right, the one that says your claim can't be falsified. Dumb of them to have missed that!
meta studies exist
I wonder how much of this is due to there simply being different types of chickens. I would guess that most commercial egg layers are from a specific or small subset of optimized chicken types. While there is a larger variety in the type of chickens people raise in their back yards. My brother has 3 different types of chickens and each lays visually different eggs.
Quails. Even cuter than chickens and much more easy to keep. Might be one of the easiest to keep animals overall. Not even ant colonies, fish, cats or dogs are as happy with as little as quails.
Housespiders and cacti might be easier.
You need to use quail proof feeders, tho, or you're going to spend a fortune on kitchen scraps or whatever you intend to feed them. They eat just about anything peckable except oats (if you didn't end up with picky ones). Cookef rice, seeds, peas, boiled eggs, sometimes nibbling on each other (-.-), or dirt cheap quail feed. Also mealworms ... its catnip for quails.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation.
I recommend cutting the head off with a pair of high quality, large and well maintained scissors.
Put a bucket in front of you, put the scissors from behind on the neck, just below the head, and cut in a single strong motion.
The lil birdy will not understand what is happening and wont feel uncomfortable during the process. Its head then looses consciousness in sbout 15 seconds, compared to about 30 seconds for the cervical dislocation method. (It'll loose the ability to feel pain MUCH faster than 15s, but I dont think we know how quickly. But probably faster than it'll realize that there's pain in the first place. You've probably cut yourself before and noticed that the pain only kicks in after a moment.)
It is also way easier to not screw up. Just remember to ALWAYS cut the head off completely, as fast as possible. Lil birdie wont die from bloodloss, but sudden loss of spinal fluid, which is WAY faster.
The cervical dislocation method is also very effective, but also much easier to screw up, a bit more uncomfortable for the birdy and could introduce quite some anxiety for the birdy if you hesitate for even but a moment.
On the other hand the cute little critters dont understand how scissors work or what they're for. Even if the method is much less pretty, it's by far the most peaceful method for the birdy.
I've had chickens for probably 15 years now, starting with 3 and ending up with about 20 (mixture of hybrids, pedigrees and rescued battery/farmed hens) and 2 geese. This happens a lot with chickens. Chickens are a gateway drug to more chickens. If you have a few chickens, they take about as much looking after as a rabbit - keep their food and water topped up, and clean them out once a week.
I agree that you won't make money or a profit. The coop money you will probably never earn back, but I can cover the cost of a sack of feed (£12 or so) by selling boxes to colleagues for £1 each.
I think the eggs taste better because a) what the hens eat and b) because they are much fresher.
I've had to kill chickens (and hate doing it), which is sad, but I've never taken one to a vet. It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
We've brought chickens inside the house when they're ill (we have tiled floors) but don't do it on a regular basis. If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets. Surprisingly smart and pleasant animals. This will also sound weird but if you pick one up, they also smell nice - kind of like a new puppy smell.
Sounds like the true answer is having a colleague you can buy £1 eggs from.
£1 egg is quite expensive tho: 10 free range eggs at Tesco cost like £3 or so.
Heh I meant £1 egg boxes of course, like GGP mentioned.
Eggs are still pretty cheap in the UK, free range ones for £1.50 or so.
For one or a dozen?
It's about €0.35 per organic egg in the Netherlands (€3.19/10 in one store or €5.99/15 at another). The organic eggs have better shells and are so cheap it's not worth bothering with free range eggs, even if you don't care for the chickens. It helps that they're not refrigerated and last a long time, so you don't have to pay for spoilage.
6
Hahaha - possibly!
> It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
This logic is confusing. You are taking a purely transactional view when it comes to the chicken’s health, but you also admitted they don’t turn a profit. In that vein, it makes no sense to get the £20 chicken in the first place.
Your utilitarian view is also the opposite of what the person you’re replying to is describing. Do you believe that if one gets a pet cat or dog for free from the street and they get sick, “it makes no sense to get an £X vet bill on a pet which was free”? And if not, what’s the difference? Neither is making you money.
I think it is the distinction between "livestock" and "pets".
I would also be very surprised if any vets ever managed to treat a hen successfully. They tend to hide any illness until very sick.
> I would also be very surprised if any vets ever managed to treat a hen successfully.
I know for a fact it is possible. I am acquainted with veterinaries and have kept chickens temporarily while they were recuperating.
> They tend to hide any illness until very sick.
Indeed. So do rabbits and other “exotic” pets. It does make treatment harder, but experienced people tend to develop a sense to notice it sooner. You yourself have probably already developed that skill to some extent and might be able to identify “strange” behaviour is specific individual chickens.
>>You yourself have probably already developed that skill to some extent and might be able to identify “strange” behaviour is specific individual chickens.
That might be hard to do with a flock of 20. If they were pets the calculation might be different.
My neighbor‘s dog bit one of our chickens. We ended up taking her to the vet and got some antibiotics. she made a full recovery.
And yes, there’s a bit of the mix of pets and livestock. We only have five hens, and they all have names. If you’re naming your animal, is it a pet?
Farmers around here have a few dozen cows and they still all have names. They're not pets.
Our hen was treated successfully, but it wasn't for a sickness, in this case it was an injury:
She somehow got one of her talons very loose and it ripped off, naturally becoming infected. The treatment was antibiotics and later full amputation of the toe in question + chicken house rest. She's still living happily, but would've died without treatment. Overall, it was a surprisingly cheap treatment ($130CAD?)
Really? I have taken chickens to the vet twice (in 8 years).
First was one taken by a fox. My wife chased the fox and he dropped the chicken (she was too heavy for him). She had a broken leg and a broken wing. Both perfectly treatable and she went on to make a full recovery, resumed laying. As result of her closer contact with people during her recuperation she became very tame and socialized with visitors on the deck in the evening. Arguable she became a pet after her vet treatment.
Second was one with an eye infection (eyelids swollen so she couldn't see). She also made a full recovery.
I don't take every sick chicken to the vet, but if you've kept chickens for long enough you get an idea when it's likely to be mworthwhile (it's never financially worthwhilte). What's worthwhile will vary according to what you can afford and how you relate to your flock generally, the age and health of the hen and likelihood of recovery.
We do take our geese to the vet. They don't have names, but they live for 40 years. Not sure why that is a factor but it definitely is.
It makes sense if someone likes chickens in general but doesn't care much about any individual chicken.
> It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. By analogy, it makes no sense to have my cat go to the vet either (and pay thousands of dollars for a ~$50 cat lol), but they still go. I guess it's all about personal choice and perspective. It does feel a bit silly in a way though
> but if you pick one up, they also smell nice
Agreed, a clean chicken can smell really good!
> If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets
That's the big thing! On Japanese twitter, chicken diapers are a popular item!
I have two geese as well—have you found they help against predators? Anecdotally, we've had no predators steal any chickens since we added them (though a coyote got some goose tail feathers at first), though our neighbors down the street have been decimated by foxes.
Never considered the ROI, but I built a big walk-in coop for maybe $200 in materials. Think that'd pay off with the current price of eggs, if we sold them.
The geese we put to bed every night, and let out in the morning so they are generally locked away when a fox would come. A friend of ours has about 15 geese and pretty sure they have lost goslings to foxes.
They good at deterring delivery drivers though, and generally alerting people.
Is the paperwork in the UK (I'm assuming you're UK-based, hence £) particularly onerous? I heard things were getting more complicated if you just wanted a few chickens in your garden.
According to this website [0] you just need to register with the Animal and Plant Health Agency.
[0] https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/maintain-the-garden/ke...
There is some paperwork now in that you have to register your flock. I dread the day though that we are told to kill our hens because of an outbreak.
It was bad enough keeping them undercover for one winter.
The taste is definitely different, and the reason for its is the diet. Small scale chickens tend to eat a lot of grass, rather than the cheaper feed given to factory farms.
A upside that was not mention is that chickens are excellent in cutting grass and keeping weed out of bushes, especially roses bushes. They generally don't eat fruits on bushes like raspberries, but our strawberries was not safe so we used a gardening net over those (also keeps other birds out). Smaller plants/seed may also need a net until they grown in size large enough that the chickens are not interested anymore.
A major big upside we also got is that they hunt down slugs and other insects that otherwise can cause major damage to a garden or lawn. Even ant colonies, which can often be a pain to remove and a major annoyance if they invade your home.
On the downside, chicken hierarchy is a very real thing and they can get into quite bloody fights with each other.
> If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
It's just the circle of life. Live in a remotely rural area with animals around and you're going to see pretty regular death. For instance foxes are beautiful, extremely intelligent, and amazing animals. They'll also systematically and sadistically kill literally every single chicken inside a henhouse, one by one, if they get in. In another instance a dog I loved more than anything as a child to young adult was killed by a wild boar - tusk straight into the lungs.
The same, by the way, applies to vegetarian stuff. The amount of critters being killed to keep them away from the veggies would probably shock you, especially in the rather inhumane way its sometimes done in industrial farms. Shooting, for some baseline, is considered one of the most humane ways of dealing with large pests.
I simply see nothing wrong, at all, with eating meat. It's a natural and normal part of life and also, by far, the easiest way to ensure you hit all your necessary nutrients without going overboard on calories - especially if you live an active life and/or are into things like weight training.
Murder is also part of the “circle of life”, whatever that may mean, given that it’s pablum that means nothing. As is disease.
We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.
That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.
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 and the mortality of actions.
“Living things” is a sleight of hand, logically. When it comes down to it, everything is just atoms in the end. So why not murder? Why not steal? Why not exploit the poor? Reductionism leads us down some very dark paths indeed.
> 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.
> 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.
I agree. If a mouse could reason morally and inside the system it currently inhabits, it might reason that way because it was unconscious of or had no access to alternatives for survival.
It’s is absolutely inappropriate to assume any morals on a species that has no capacity for reason.
Some birds. And some people.
Morality is arrived at through value judgement. We have a social contract with each other, not animals.
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.
What people generally oppose today is a function of their consciousness and ability to access alternatives. They don’t oppose slaughter because they don’t think there’s an alternative, the same way that a person who is on the verge of starvation will steal food. They also don’t oppose slaughter because it’s hidden away from them, and done by others.
Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.
It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? If you’re not careful with your compassion, you’ll end up having it for all sorts of beings you’ve come to see as like yourself.
> Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.
No it's not. I always find the idea that humans are not in some way special (at least to other humans) off-putting. Even animals treat members of their own species generally better than they treat other species.
I love animals, I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible. At the same time I would not hesitate to kill an animal for food or if it endangered another human.
The cognate here is about how attitudes about systemic actions can change due to a shift in consciousness and access to alternatives. Many people saw black people as not their own kind, and saw no reason — beyond economic imperative - to treat them with compassion.
You said yourself:
>I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible.
It becomes more possible to treat animals with more respect and dignity every day. For vast portions of the population (Not all! Not yet!) the slaughter of animals for food is becoming less and less necessary.
So the question becomes, given that you believe we should treat animals with as much respect and dignity as possible, do you believe you have a moral imperative to take advantage of these systemic advances?
Good points.
I think where we disagree is the question of whether slaughter is necessarily undignified or disrespectful. When I say "treat them with dignity and respect" I think the experience of the animal up to the point of death is what's most important. The slaughter, if done humanely and quickly, is not inherently immoral to me. For example, I think most people would agree that it's better to "put down" a suffering pet than let them die of natural causes.
My problem mainly lies with industrial farming practices like battery cages.
> My problem mainly lies with industrial farming practices like battery cages.
Yeah, we definitely have common ground here. I’ll also mention that industrial farming practices are also cruel to people. Slaughterhouses in the US are overwhelmingly staffed by migrant laborers who work in unsafe conditions, for low pay, being exposed to antibiotics that damage their long term health.
We can and should do better.
> They don’t oppose slaughter because they don’t think there’s an alternative
That's clearly not true, and a projection.
They don't oppose slaughter because they find no objection with killing an animal for nourishment, "necessity" having no bearing.
That's factually incorrect. You don't have to kill a plant to get the fruit and/or the seeds it produces.
Do you follow every basic drive built into DNA?
Killing is part of the "circle of life". Murder is not. They are two very different concepts.
You skipped a step. Immoral acts are immoral because we deem them so. Animal slaughter in itself is not generally thought as such. Unless you think aboriginal / hunter-gatherer tribes who maintain their traditions are immoral for not modernizing.
> It's a natural and normal part of life
So is dying of smallpox.
Wikipedia:
> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.
Completely natural, and completely normal.
That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.
The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.
Ease cannot be used to ethically justify an action. But even so, you ignore that, according to research, people who eat meat have worse health than people who don't.
It's not that simple. High consumption of animal saturated fat can raise total blood cholesterol, but animal consumption in and of itself does not necessitate that. Notwithstanding, with a balanced diet high in vegetables and fiber, omnivores do not fare any worse than vegans in acm.
While that’s true in theory, we don’t observe a sufficient fiber intake for most human omnivore. That is Erfgh point : the classic diet don’t meet nutrients goals when studied on the field by researchers.
> we don’t observe a sufficient fiber intake for most human omnivore.
This has no bearing on the argument. That is just as true of vegans who purchase boxed products.
It's also fairly US-centric. If you observe countries with the longest lifespan, lowest CVD incidence and overall best health outcomes, they consume a more varied whole-foods diet with animal products.
> the classic diet
This is the Americanized diet of ultra-processed foods. Whole foods are the solution, which is in no way shape or form contingent on whether animal products are included (unless the diet is "carnivore" which is not representative, and even there you can find traditional societies who fare ok even if not completely optimally).
I agree that a whole food diet is better than the “boxed” one but I have no comparaison point for the US. I’m from France and many people value whole food, “good products” and cook at home however even those gets diabetes, intestinal and blood cancers and other problems that would be easily avoided with more vegetable consumption. The fact is meat is often the central peace of the dish, second the carbs and then salads, cabbages and roots. People say they loves them but when they are on the plate it’s more a decoration that a portion.
> diabetes
This scales principally with excess weight gain.
> The fact is meat is often the central peace of the dish, second the carbs and then salads, cabbages and roots.
This is one meal, dinner, and the fact that it is more protein-heavy is not the problem. Nevermind ratio, some diets are devoid of fiber. The secondary "carbs" are just pasta, white bread, crackers, etc.
If you consume a whole-foods diet, with a dinner that has a larger meat component, you will easily, easily have enough fiber.
> If you consume a whole-foods diet, with a dinner that has a larger meat component, you will easily, easily have enough fiber.
I mostly agree but not with the easy part: you thirst has a maximum and people can’t ingest as much food they want without a limit. If you have a large meat component there’s less space in your belly for the vegetables. The point for carbs is the same (they cut your satiety and you’ll be less hungry for the cauliflower). Thought I get your point that a diet including meat isn’t bad in itself, but if you look around the biggest meat eaters are not the fittest, however the opposite might often be true.
Look up Sepp Holzer on YouTube, or really any permaculturist that eats meat. They treat their animals well, but also eat them. I think it’s healthy to feel a twang when you kill anything. It can contribute to the gratitude you have when sitting down to a meal. The native cultures seem (at least in pop culture caricatures) to have understood this.
I have a farmer friend who occasionally has to kill one of his milk cows. He names them, pets them, cares for them like a pet. It pains him to kill them, and I always know when he’s had to do it— I can see it on his face. I’ve bought some of the meat form his cows, and I was grateful for the meat, and the man who raised the cow with such care.
Past generations of my family used to name animals that they raised for meat after dishes they could end up in. There are practices people can engage in to distance themselves from the animals they interact with.
But also some people who raise animald for meat hire a person to collect them for slaughter in part because of the emotional toll involved.
As to your last question.. I think you might be confused? People don't like to kill in general. Go outside and ask people how they felt getting their first kill on a hunt as a kid, you're going to realize that a unifying element is learning to deal with harming another animal.
Bonus: being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
> being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.
The dark truth about keeping chickens and many other poultry is that they hatch in an approximately 1:1 male:female ratio, but can't be kept in that ratio without severe conflict and stress. Thus, hatching chickens to keep for egg-laying requires killing most of the male chicks. So yes, you have to kill chickens to eat eggs.
The "severe conflict and stress" part may be hard to understand for the cityfolk; you have to kill chickens to eat eggs, or else they will do it.
Same for dairy cattle: males are redundant. My grandfather was an AI pioneer in the UK in the 1940s. AI being artificial insemination of dairy cattle....
I mean, dairy cattle also have the issue of keeping the female pregnant and then taking the baby anyway. And then, once they are done producing milk, what do you do with a giant animal?
Same with chickens that lose the ability to produce eggs.
We put the redundant roosters in the woods, let nature do the killing for us. They didn't last one night.
Getting eaten alive makes you feel better than euthanizing them quickly?
Well, at least a wild animal had something to eat?
I'd say main benefit is not doing it youself.
That is pretty much just fruit. Vegetables are typically either the whole body of the plant (like carrots) or a vital part.
I killed so many slugs eating my broccoli it started to get to me. I technically didn't kill them myself, I put the cannibals in a bucket together. 1/3 to 1/2 bucket per day. About 30 full buckets for 20 broccoli plants of which about 8 were ruined.
Same. Buckets upon buckets. You can’t even feed them to the chickens, critters who eat literally anything won‘t eat slugs.
I have seen a cat gobble a slug, so your mileage may vary.
Ducks love slugs, oddly.
The conversation is about the necessity of killing what you eat. Those slugs have nothing to do with either argument nor were they a necessary casualty.
I think in practice pest control does require killing the pest, and in that example was a necessary part of growing broccoli to harvesy
Not sure how killing things and then not eating them is morally superior. If you aren't eating meat you are probably getting most of your calories from grains and legumes. The people that grow and store those for you are killing a lot of animals to get them to your grocery store.
This response feels quite emotional, so I’ll start by saying there was no judgement in my comment. At no point have I made a comment on the morality of the matter. Furthermore, not only do grocery stores not even enter into the conversation, you are assuming to know what the people who grow and sell the food at my local markets eat. I assure you, you do not.
I think you’ll benefit from this video. Don’t let yourself be consumed by emotions of an imaginary argument. The entirety of your point is a response to something you imagined I said and not my words or intentions.
I think you misunderstood me, perhaps I didn't express myself well. You said the slugs were not a necessary casualty. Growing the acres and acres of grain and pulses necessary for a vegan diet necessitates the killing of way more animals (insects and rodents, etc) than the few cows, chickens, or pigs necessary to feed a carnivore. Every kind of agriculture requires killing. There is no other way to do it at scale.
The real problem is the sheer number of humans we have to feed. Hopefully another couple centuries of low birth rates will help.
Admittedly this is pedantry on my part, but isn’t this only true for fruits? GP’s argument seems perfectly valid for e.g. carrots or mushrooms.
Mushrooms are “fruits”. The “plant” itself is the mycelium underground and the mushroom is the “fruity” part which is produced to spread the “seeds” (spores).
And fruits are broader than most people think. Many of the things you think as vegetables are fruits: pumpkins, zucchinis, tomatoes. But even outside fruits there is food you can harvest without harming the plant, like potatoes. And we haven’t even gotten into seeds and grains, like rice.
So you can definitely live without killing what you eat.
Hah of course you're 100% right on mushrooms - that totally slipped my mind. Am I completely out to lunch on root vegetables though?
> Mushrooms are “fruits”. The “plant” itself is the mycelium underground and the mushroom is the “fruity” part which is produced to spread the “seeds” (spores).
They are the "fruiting body" of the fungus, but biologically they are not fruit.
That is correct, which is why I used quotes. It is important to not get bogged down in pedantry and lose sight of the argument, though. The matter being discussed is if you need to kill what you eat, and I’m using “fruit” as a shorthand for the thing a plant produces to be eaten but is not the plant itself.
aren't plants alive?
They are, and you don’t kill them or harm them to eat the things they produce with the purpose of being eaten and spread. If you want to engage in the conversation, please make an effort to do so in good faith and actually address the arguments. If you’re only going to make basic queries everyone already agrees with, we’re just wasting time and space.
"Aren't plants alive?" is such a bad faith argument that I don't know why you even bother replying. It's legitimately on the level of "internet troll". I eat meat btw, but I wouldn't even entertain someone that pretends there's no difference between a sentient mammal and a stalk of broccoli
You are right, of course. But I have noticed as of late that I sometimes became unkind in my replies, which I don’t like and didn’t use to happen. I want to do better.
Surely the right move here is not to play, but if you don’t get annoyed trolls can’t win either.
The point is that you're still killing that broccoli, not that the two acts have equal moral value. It doesn't normally need to be said but you know, someone was wrong on the internet
Ever ate a carrot? The whole plant has to be "killed". Killing doesn't even make sense in the context of plants, a lot of them can just be cloned from a leaf, stem or root. Where do you draw the line between damaging and killing a plant, the termination of the apical meristem? The plant will stop growing but it can still clone itself, or grow more apical meristems...
This whole argument is absolutely meaningless.
edit: just pointing out I'm not directly replying to you but to the whole thread.
> purpose of being eaten and spread
why do you get to decide that it isn't the purpose of a cow to be eaten?
You're arguing on the Internet, it's already a waste of time and space.
> why do you get to decide that it isn't the purpose of a cow to be eaten?
Pretty sure it is the cow's purpose. Humans first domesticated a wild animal and then with selective breeding cows were "made". That has no weight on ethics tho.
Also, this is a ridiculous argument.
If someone raises their human kid “to be eaten”, that would be the purpose of the kid.
Does that make it ok to eat the kid?
Here’s a compromise.
Neither you nor I get to decide what the purpose of another sentient being is.
Absolutely. But while I cannot declare its ultimate "final cause", perhaps I have some right to declare a penultimate one? I have my reasons for believing this is the case. What are your reasons for believing it is not (or do you believe that we do have some right to declare penultimate final causes for living creatures, and if so, what are the limits?)
> why do you get to decide that it isn't the purpose of a cow to be eaten?
Clearly you’ve never experienced the sight of animals in a slaughterhouse, as they realise what is happening to the animals in front and begin to panic and violently bellow and push back.
> You're arguing on the Internet, it's already a waste of time and space.
That is only true for people who don’t engage in good faith and don’t have a genuine desire to learn and are open to changing their minds. For everyone else, it can and does provide value.
your attempt to evoke an emotion doesn't answer my question though.
Why do you get to decide that the purpose of a cow isn't to be eaten?
Why do you get to decide it is? The onus of proof is on the one making the claim.
I guess someone could also repeatedly bash you over the head with a tire iron and break your legs, and when criticised reply “how do you know their purpose isn’t to get hurt?”
“Well, when I approached them to hit them, they cowered in fear, asked for mercy, and tried to flee.”
“Your attempt to evoke an emotion doesn’t answer the question though. How do you know their purpose is not to be ravaged?”
> They are, and you don’t kill them or harm them to eat the things they produce with the purpose of being eaten and spread.
There is a chasm of difference between your purpose and the purpose of something you do.
If you build a chair, the purpose of doing so could be to sit or to earn money by selling it. We can derive exactly which from your actions and the outcomes, but there is still an identifiable purpose. However, it is entirely different to claim your purpose is to build chairs.
Similarly, in my previous example someone can hit someone else with the purpose of harming them, but it doesn’t mean that person’s purpose is to cause harm.
Do you see the difference? I do kind of feel like I’m discussing middle school philosophy here. I surely hope that is not my purpose. This whole conversation was unnecessary with a tiny bit of steel manning on your part, don’t you think? Does it truly seem reasonable to you to claim an entire species’ purpose is to do something they do not only not pursue but actively avoid? I’m confident you are able to see the point by now.
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, be responsible for less killing, and today do it without having to give up the textures and experiences they've be conditioned on.
It's difficult in 2025 to conclude that a person who doesn't choose to eat this way is particularly opposed to killing, in the way that you propose.
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?
Insects do not have the same level of sentience as birds and mammals.
However, do keep in mind that a large proportion of agricultural output is used to feed animals.
It takes 20 to 40 plant calories to raise one calorie of beef. So slaughtering a cow kills 20 to 40 times the number of lives as eating plants directly.
Number of calories !== number of lives
If anything, I would expect the number of insects, small mammals, etc. killed by harvesting animal feed to be higher than that of harvesting crops grown for people, on a caloric basis.
What makes my wife and I fail every time is protein intake. We are both active and require a lot of protein. We drink whey protein 1x a day, have quinoa for salads and occasionally eat eggs. The problem is come dinnertime, we have few options. We can't eat: - beans: Yes, I rolled my eyes too. My wife gets bloated painfully and it's happened so many times that I've stopped preparing bean-primary dishes - beyond meat: it's expensive, gas and bloat is still an issue, a big one
Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).
Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need. We always go back to chicken because of this
> We are both active and require a lot of protein.
I'm curious what your targets are. I've found getting 0.8g of protein per kg of bodyweight (USDA recommendation) is easy on any diet whereas 1.5g/kg or higher on a vegan diet can be hard depending on your target macro ratio. If you're bulking or doing long-distance running/biking (i.e. carbs aren't a limiting factor) then it's totally doable. Besides tofu, seitan, and beans there's lentils, chickpeas, edamame, spinach, nuts, seeds, nooch, etc.
> beans: ... My wife gets bloated painfully
If she's committed to making beans work you could experiment with varieties and preparation methods that are more digestible, or she could try Beano. But honestly that seems like a lot of work.
> beyond meat: it's expensive, gas and bloat is still an issue, a big one
Same, I just can't digest it. I'm glad the faux meats exist for folks who want them, but I'm sad at how it's displaced other veggie burgers at restaurants.
> Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).
I've come to appreciate the blank canvas they provide but that did take a lot of trial and error to get to the point where I knew what to do with them. Similar to beans it depends on how committed you are. (In my case it took a long time for the incongruence between my food choices and my ethics to grow big enough to overcome my innate laziness and affinity for barbecue.)
> Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need.
I know a few vegans into powerlifting/streetlifting, and as mentioned above bulking isn't too hard -- the real issue is cutting. Every one of them supplements with protein powders, especially while cutting. Then again, so do all the omnivore lifters I know.
> beans
Have you tried various types? cannellini beans don't seem to have the same effect as others in my experience.
Perhaps have a look of tempeh, it’s more digestible that beans (because pre disgusted by shroom) and already comes with a slight nutty flavor but that stuff is a songe (shroom…) and get impregnated sigh any marinade very quickly.
The tvp are tasteless by design, my way is to use them to mimic sliced beef recipes therefore 1) they get different flavors depending on what I cook 2) they trigger my memories and those makes me feel more taste that they are.
For the beans digestability another tip is to remove/by dehulled beans, that’s the hardest part to digest. Also soaking them overnight is a big help for digestion.
Being against child slavery doesn’t exclude you from benefitting from child slavery when you use your phone.
I guess you should just be pro child slavery and enslaved some kids to do your housework then?
Cars kill 50k Americans a year. I guess we are just ok with killing peoplr and therefore shouldn’t be against murder either?
It doesn’t even take philosophy 101 to understand there’s a significant moral gulf between killing deliberately and incidentally.
> 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 can't protest. However, once you agree, you must come up with a name and you must follow through. You must kill this person no matter what within a short time frame (make something up like a month).
I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.
> I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.
I don't think that's surprising, and it doesn't meant that people are okay with or blasé about killing people. Like, arguably this is just the trolley problem rephrased; there exist people whose death would clearly be a vast net benefit and would save many other lives. So is it okay to kill them? It's not an easy question.
I think it's more or less unrelated to the issue of killing one's own chickens; there is no such thing as an evil chicken who death will save thousands.
If you got that person in front of them and put a gun in their hand, do you think they'd follow through?
Your question is like a game, and people you ask will most probably treat it as such. People 'kill' in videogames, but most would not like to actually kill in real life.
I feel like that's a different question though. Most people have at least one person they think would make the world a better place by their absence, but that's not quite the same thing as wanting to kill them, even if they would guaranteed get away with it.
(for a pithy version: "I've never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure")
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.
Kinda disagree on the latter part. If there's no chance to toss them in prison, but other opportunities, do whatever is necessary to prevent further suffering.
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.
That’s why I say we need a detailed list, and a long one. Most bastards are in the middle of these structures, not on top (with notable exceptions).
Your game doesn't test what you say it does, but someone else already covered that.
I'm not saying people have an inbuilt moral objection to the idea of killing, I'm saying most people find hurting other living things emotionally difficult.
This doesn't sound like "liking to kill" but more so like an "I know someone who's an absolute piece of shit and the world would be better off without them" kind of deal.
The curse of a poll. You always get more than you asked for because any question is too flat.
Putin and Xi immediately jumped to my mind.
There are autocrats all over the world I could name. Unfortunately there are most likely a whole list of people ready and waiting to step into their place.
It's different perspectives.
For a lot of people it's an exchange thing. You give the chicken a place to stay, food and care and in exchange you get to eat it when it gets old. They do bond with them but there's this understanding from day 1.
If you don't get that out of it it'd turn into an omlette so instead of turning into an omlette it gets to enjoy a large percentage of its life.
One needs to decide if an animal is a product or a pet. It's difficult to have them be both.
Having them as a product does not mean you don't care for them, on the contrary, but I would say it's a completely different type of bond.
> But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
I would argue it's about the purpose, not the bond. You don't kill a pet, but you do kill food. And you should never kill for the sole sake of killing.
> but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land
You needed HN to figure that out? I assume this is obvious sarcasm but almost none of the domesticated animals species would exist if almost all humans throughout history weren't willing to do that.
Even eating dogs was perfectly standard in most more "primitive" and/or destitute societies.
My wifes family was wicked as they would let the children bond with the animals, without letting them know they gonna be dinner.
She tells a story of a wonderful pet goat. Until one day it was "gone to another farm", and they enjoyed goat curry for dinner.
The older siblings knew... and now they dont talk lol.
I grew up the same for much of my childhood tho it was never hidden or explicitly stated all the time. I bear absolutely 0 resentment about any of that tbh. I just fed the chickens, petted the goats, waved the bees away from fruits and helped pluck the chickens
In the end it makes me feel like the people eating their nuggets but have a traumatic reaction to what created them are the odd ones.
My friend would spend summers at the family farm, and the youngest kids would be issued a rabbit as a pet for the duration. They'd then make the kids watch the rabbits be slaughtered and cleaned, and serve them up at the end of the vacation...
Straight psychopath approach to child raising. The adults were all convinced this is how you made kids grow up tough
That's straight from the TV trope book, this is how movies/shows portray Evil Organization training ruthless spy assassins (except usually it's a dog, and they have to kill it themselves).
Most tropes have some basis in reality. I've met a few farm-owning parents who view any kind of sentimentality towards animals as counterproductive.
But that's normal - emotionally boding with a farm animal you intend to slaughter and eat is indeed counterproductive.
The trope is about something different - it's about intentionally making a subject bond with an animal over long time, as with a close friend, and then finally making them kill the animal as a final test of loyalty.
Doing that in real life, and for no good reason, is just sick.
It is, those people think this practice will speed up process of that bond being understood as counterproductive.
Or why should the "bond" cause us to not eat animals? They aren't pets we eat in a panic, but animals we raise with the intention of eating but still bond with them and continue the process through consuming them and letting the animal go on to fulfill a higher purpose of providing sustenance to the humans they bonded with.
> Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
I love my chickens and I'm really sad when I lose some to predators. Yet I have no issue to harvest them for eating. They are not pets, I raise them for eggs and meat.
Maybe it's because I was raised on a farm, but I make a difference between pets and farm animals and that does not mean that I don't have a "bond" with some of the latter.
The first step is to acknowledge that there is something wrong here. This categorization of "pets" and "farm animals" as different sets is completely virtual. In real life, both are just animals.
It is completely virtual, but are you going to include humans into animal group too? Because we're just animals with ties and anxiety.
You have be arguing in bad faith if you claim that you don't see difference between a random cat and a cattle.
Why should they "bat an eye" about killing animals raised on their own land? It's how we've lived since the dawn of time. Death is a part of life.
If you think it's wrong to kill animals to eat, I would ask you "By what moral standard?"
This argument would be valid if humanity would continue all practices it has done "since the dawn of time".
We have dropped some practices and we continue with some. We no longer leave the dead to rot, we bury/burn them, and so on. We developed religions, science, etc, and we are in a different era now, our lifestyle has completely changed, we don't have to hunt, don't have to build our own shelters, and we are no longer nomadic.
I am of the opinion that `killing animals` is a practice we can safely stop now, it was a necessity at that time, but right now it is completely optional.
There are various angles to look at this. One is sustainability and another one is morality.
Sustainability: Do you think we have enough animals to feed 8 Billion people on earth meat daily? I hope you know why we had to fallback to agriculture as a source of nutrition. Why most early settlements were started on river banks?
Morality: My moral standard is: Don't kill animals for my own sake of pleasure, kill only what's necessary for my survival, kill only what is there to kill me/hurt me.
So can I "kill" plants?: Yes (Using the term 'kill' wrt plants is just wrong, but I will continue with it for the sake of argument).
How is it morally okay to kill a plant but not okay to kill an animal?:
Let's agree on the definition of an animal. By animal, we all mean the set of (humans, pets, goat, horse, pig, lion, etc), there are no plants in this set. They are in a set called `living_beings`, which will have bacteria, viruses, insects as well (who can be further clubbed into smaller sets). Now my moral standard is "Not kill animals" (Not 'don't kill living beings'). It is on this entire set, not selectively for X or Y, which will be hypocritical. I am applying the same level of morality to everyone in this set. Now coming to plant-based food. First of all vegetarian food is not just plants. It is fruits, vegetables (akin to fruits), seeds, leaves, and other different parts. The plants are not always "killed" unlike when producing meat-based food (except eggs). The plants are "evolutionary hardened",i.e. built for harvesting, they don't die if you pluck a fruit (moreover they drop it naturally). They don't die when you take a flower or take a bunch of leaves (as long as you are within limits). The same can't be said for any animal.
Is the use of pesticides, deforestation, and killing of insects/rodents okay for producing large amounts of vegetarian food?:
No, I am against that but I don't see any other alternative to feed the calorific needs of 8 Billion people on earth. Of course there are other farming practices but they can't be commercialized or don't have high yields. As much as we can, we should try to eat locally sourced items to avoid carbon emissions due to transportation over large distances.
So what will be my ideal world that is according to my moral standards?: Ideally, everyone has a backyard where they can grow their own plant-based food. If you want better nutrition coverage, keep some chicken and eat the eggs. Let the chickens enjoy their lives, doing chicken things.
Will I eat an animal if I am stranded on an island with nothing else to eat?: Yes, at my current level of ego, I would prefer to stay alive by killing and eating the said animal.
Just so you know I agree the "counterargument" about killing plants makes no sense at all. But thank you for your thoughtful reply. My ethical framework is different than yours but I respect how well thought out yours is.
> I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals
You develop bonds, just different ones and you learn to place limits because you know what the purpose of the animal is.
I still felt it when I was really little, but that was gone by the time I was a teenager and the reality that this was our living set in.
I grew up with backyard chickens. It was great, but youre missing one downside: the smell. Chickens shit a lot. Also, the predator thing is understated. You don’t just need defenses, your defenses are likely to fail. If this happens, you may wake up to the sound of your pet being mauled to death and your yard covered in feathers.
The two-decade war between my Dad and the local foxes cannot be understated. The chickens are fully enclosed, naturally. They currently have a (completely buried) overturned concrete igloo under their feet. There’s a dual perimeter fence, the outer one is regularly coated in all manner of larger mammal’s urine he buys online. Team Fox is currently tunnelling to map out the concrete igloo, convinced there’s an opening. They’ve gone full mole.
With some distance it’s quite amusing, but it’s claimed a large part of his life, being the obstinate bugger he is.
Pea gravel. Lots of pea gravel in the holes. Blow it in with water.
You can't tunnel in pea gravel.
I will pass this on to the general, he appreciates the intel.
That's awesome. My father has been waging a similar war with the coyotes in the woods behind our farm for maybe 5 years now. Your foxes sound way more intrepid though, the coyotes here haven't tried burrowing, yet...
> - You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life. Imagine euthanizing your dog or cat by hand...
I visited a farm as a kid and we had fresh chicken for dinner one day. They had one of those orange road cones with the top cut off a bit to fit the chicken in upside down so they could easily chop off its head. They then run around for awhile after that because their nervous system is still working for a minute or so. Just something to interesting to learn as a 5th grader, I guess.
My neighbor has chickens and the predators are no joke. Raccoons constantly trying to weaken their coop, weasels always ready to slip into any little hole, hawks and other birds of prey circling overhead. They've lost a lot of chickens despite keeping a close eye on them and trying to keep a very sturdy coop. It's like a signal goes out to all the wild animals "COME GET TASTY CHICKENS HERE!" Of course we are in a pretty rural area. You can get some pretty cute fluffy chickens though.
Tell them to get a farm dog or two. That’s pretty much the only working answer to predators on a farm.
We're a bit rural but still too tightly packed for farm dogs. They've got a regular dog but it doesn't have quite the free rein a farm dog requires to keep chickens locked down. Kind of the worst of both worlds as far as the chickens are concerned.
That was my problem with backyard chickens. The raccoons are too clever. They never got into the coop, but they were persistent about weakening the run, and eventually learned our schedule for putting them in the coop for the night, and got up early to beat us to it. Chickens are a tragic pet just because absolutely everything wants to eat them.
I lived with backyard chickens for a time. It‘s surprisingly hard to keep predators away. These animals are clever and very determined when it comes to a freely presented meal. After all, better enclosures also give chickens no means of escape.
Yep, this is a problem right here. Once something does make it in it's a massacre.
> Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent.
They did tests on chickens, and apparently they understand the concept of showing restraint on a current action, with the view on having a larger reward later.
Something along the lines of: "If you don't eat these grains now, we'll reward you with twice as many grains later".
That's something that dogs can't do, for instance.
Maybe the dog just values immediate reward higher even though it understands it could get even more later? How would you control for that?
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it
I didn't notice a significant difference in taste either. Eggs taste like eggs, it is one of the foods where there is the fewest difference between home grown and store bought, and also between different grades of store bought. And if there is any difference, I think that freshness is more significant.
One big difference, though it doesn't matter much when you eat it is the shell. Good quality eggs, including those from backyard chicken tend to have a stronger shell that breaks cleanly.
Maybe if you give your chicken specific food, your eggs can have a specific taste. How you feed them can affect the color of the yolk, which can matter for presentation, but it doesn't tell much else.
> it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution
Does this also take into account the current price of eggs in the same product category? i.e., organic, free-range eggs?
For current Erewhon prices, 8 eggs a day is $11.30 in free eggs a day, so $339 in eggs a month?
https://erewhon.com/subcategory/33022/eggs - $16.99 a dozen
I'm not who you're replying to... but: it cost me $2-2.5k to build my coop two years ago which houses 5 hens, and they cost roughly $10-20 per month to feed, change bedding, etc. Realistically my household eats 4 dozen eggs a month. Even with current egg prices I'm not saving any money for a long, long time.
Still absolutely worthwhile for my mentally though and one of my major life goals
>I'm not who you're replying to... but: it cost me $2-2.5k to build my coop two years ago which houses 5 hens
These numbers are absurd. You need a wooden box and some chicken wire, and chicks cost less than $1/bird. I don't understand why this always comes up on HN, where people are spending thousands of dollars on chickens. It's the simplest animal you can possibly own and they should pay for themselves almost immediately.
Can you post your chicken coop and instructions on how you built it?
It's probably best not to get specific instructions. They constrain you too much.
The cheapest way to build a chicken coop is to go to the local rubbish tip, or tip shop if the top doesn't let you fossick. Be a little imaginative with your design. For example, you can build them out of PVC water pipes. They are light, don't rot, wire can be pop riveted to them, and they are very easy to glue.
I also turned a 80 litre rubbish bin into a chicken feeder. Getting the design reliable was a few of weekends work of trail and error. However once done my time was paid back over and over again. A rubbish bin can hold an entire 30kg bad of food. It takes my chickens 3 months to go through a bag, so the reduces feeding to once per month. (We also gave then table scraps, which is a daily chore.) I also built a automatic water station out of an old office bin and a toilet inlet valve. The net result of all that is the chickens can got for months without you touching them, which is far longer than any family holiday.
Like some others here, I don't quite get the cost aspect. A carton of 12 eggs in about $6 here, and 3 chickens produce about 2 cartons a week. The food costs about $10/month. If you have a yard, food costs can be reduced by about 1/2 allowing them out during the day. Allowing them to graze can automated too - you just need a 12v electric car window opener connected to a battery, solar cell and timer. Again, if you get these things second hand they will cost you less than the $60 of food they save in a year.
All that said, yes it will take a few years to repay the costs, and even if you automate to the degree I did taking the table scraps out to them and getting the eggs remains a daily chore. To me the engineering project of "how can I automate this at least cost" was as interesting as the chickens themselves.
Chicken wire doesn't actually protect chickens from predators... Half inch or smaller hardware cloth is needed to keep them safe. The coop itself is a 4x8 (about 4' tall) building on stilts because that's roughly the minimum space that's healthy to keep in the winter if they get snowed out of their run. And I dont know where/when you've seen chicks for less than $1 per bird lately, last time I saw that was on broilers last year when the local feedstore accidentally ordered like 3000 instead of 300 and they were literally giving them away. Otherwise chicks are $4-5 each
Your first egg is $1000. After that, Free Eggs! Except for the feed, and the work.
Free range isn’t that much space still. Pasture raised is better and at my local grocery store I can get a dozen for like $8/dozen.
Erewhon is probably THEE most expensive place lol
Yeah, using erewhon to gauge price of anything isn't going to yield anything good. Well, it will reveal how much people willing to overpay to avoid seeing "poor" people.
Chickens are really smart and curious animals. They can also learn from each other new behaviour, like eating unfamiliar food, or hunting for small animals (the cries of joy from our cock once he finally got a frog!!!) They also have really marked personalities, once you spend some time with them.
> a large coop
It's large compared to the average, but the longer we've had chickens the more we're convinced they thrive better when given appropriate space (anecdata about average age of our chickens vs all other people with chickens we know), leading me to think something like yours is still too small even for 2 chickens.
For us the minimum is now such that there's at least some of the gras/moss left throughout the year instead of the puddle of mud we used to get. Plus I'm not gonne lie: seeing their (and their ancestors) behavior 'in the wild' it feels morally/ethically better as well. Especially the younger ones are keen explorers: easy to see when let ranging free - they'll go in a radius of like 100m around their nest, but not much further than that. Apart from that one mandatory weirdo obviously.
The one I built was definitely too small on all accounts (coop space and run space).
For the second coop, we bought a pre-built shed that's about 8'x12' (much taller and roomier than the first), and even that is starting to feel too small for 13 chickens with all their various items. They have a much larger run now, but even that still feels like it might not be enough for them!
Definitely it's not about the cost and convenience.
And I haven't seen it discussed much, which tells a lot that the HN-ers are city dwellers with little experience in the countryside life. But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit.
Animals produce shit and lots of animals produce loads of shit. And chickens don't have the notion of "this area is for eating, this one's for shitting", they will shit all over the place. So if you don't enclose them and can run to your porch, they'll shit it up so gotta be careful where you step or sit on. If you enclose them, better be prepared to wipe shit of your boots coze no way you can avoid it forever. Then the "pleasant" activity of cleaning up loads of shit from the chicken coop and dispose it somewhere.
Overall, having lived on a farm, my childhood memories of interaction with animals resume to "lots and lots of shit everywhere" :)
At the backyard scale it’s not so bad. My neighbor just mixed it into a big dirt pile that we all use for fertilizing our flowers and shrubs.
> But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit.
Yes. I volunteered at a Raptor conservancy. Fantastic animals and being trusted to help fly them in a display was one of the best things I've ever done. It made up for all of the poop cleaning. At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey - it reduces the poop volume and the pellets dry into hard nuggets that easy to pick up (and fun to pull apart later). Black Kites were okay-ish - most of their poop ended up on easily cleanable wall sheets behind their (outward facing) perches. But vultures. yeech. They are fascinating from a social perspective and some were very playful - pulling on your bootlaces until they were knotted, for example, but their poop is gross and voluminous. They also can use defensive projectile vomiting if they feel threatened, which is as (un)pleasant as it sounds.
But overall, great animals to be around.
> At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey
As soon as somebody showed me this as a kid, I would constantly be looking in pine groves for pellets. There was something fascinating about pulling them apart and finding the little mouse bones. Whenever I have a chance now, I point it out to kids. Some of them are fascinated like I was, some of them can't understand why I showed them something dirty and boring <shrug>.
> Some of them are fascinated like I was
At the Raptor place, we used owl pellets as part of kid-focussed activities. We'd give them a couple of pellets, a pair of tweezers and a chart of bone outlines, and say "see what animals you can identify". Tiny little jawbones were always popular.
My mom has a dozen backyard chickens and I agree with all of these. I'll tack on two bits from my own experience:
Good: Fresh unwashed eggs don't need to be refrigerated. They are perfectly safe at room temperature on the shelf for days.
Bad: You can't leave them with other pets without supervision. One of the dogs got himself a taste for chicken and already ate at least three. You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately. I had to put down one poor chicken that was deeply injured but still alive. We constantly stay vigilant to keep the dogs and chickens separate.
> You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately.
Speaking from experience, I can say "Yes, you absolutely can train this out of a dog." However, it is not easy and it is only marginally more easy if you start at a young age of the dog. Furthermore, there are breeds that have no interest in chickens at all, anyway. LGD may actually even protect them.
Depends on the nature and breed of the dog too.
My GR goes into livestock guardian mode whenever the rabbits are free roaming in the garden (even though he's a bit scared of them ever since one bit him on the nose), but some dogs, terriers especially, will just instinctively chase and kill a rabbit.
I assume it's fairly similar with chickens.
Totally fair. Unfortunately this dog is a 4 years old black lab and we don't have the capacity to train him out of it. We manage it by keeping him indoors when we let the chickens free range in the yard.
Lots of countries don't wash their commercially grown eggs (and have a much lower % from factory farms), which greatly improves shelf life in shops etc.
Yes. It was quite a culture shock to see eggs stacked up in the middle of the aisle in Mexican grocery stores. I also find that, in general, Mexican store-bought eggs taste better and have a much darker-yellow yolk.
Iirc, it’s only the US and Japan that acid wash their eggs, thus stripping the natural protective layer, and require refrigeration.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken
Looking online on reasons to euthanize chickens, it seems to be about not prolonging their suffering when ill.
I don't really know much on farming practices, and I'm not commenting to say that things should be one way or the other. However, I do note that with a human, euthanasia is not a common practice, specially without consent, and one would typically just numb the pain until they pass on their own, i.e. hospice care.
Maybe that's not possible with animals because chickens can't really communicate on the effectiveness of drugs...
Still much better treatment than factory farming.
The ancestors of chickens used to eat our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years, so I have no issues with eating them as much as I want.
I used to get tipped in eggs by this wonderful human at a bar I worked at and while I'm not sure I could tell them apart in a blind taste test I can say that the variety of pretty colors the egg shells came in and the richness of the yolk combined to make them noticeably more satisfying. I have a lot of experience tasting things though, I could absolutely see someone having a similar experience to mine and chalking it up to a superior taste. Or maybe there is a regional component to basic grocery store eggs and I live in a high quality zone, idk.
> I used to get tipped in eggs by this wonderful human at a bar
As someone who lives in a country where tipping culture doesn't extend to bars, I was imagining something quite different at first
> - I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
I eat fresh laid eggs very rarely (though have been thinking of raising my own), but can confirm that every time I've had truly fresh chicken eggs the taste is notably superior.
For me the biggest downside is that they reliably attract vermin. I tried a bunch of things to deter rats but they were ever present when we had hens
You want a rooster, too. A rooster will also keep predators away.
Right! The first egg our chickens laid cost $500, the second $250, etc. It would take a lot of laying for the cost to come even close to grocery store prices (back then) but we quit after a couple of years.
> You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation. It still ranks among the worst things I've ever had to do in my life.
Traditionally it's done by decapitation. Head dies instantly. No need to suffer. Body runs for a while. Don't forget to ask for forgiveness...
If you properly dislocate it (thus severing the nerve) it doesn't even get to twitch. In theory it's slightly cleaner and better even for the chicken.
It does require a bit of technique though, and the consequences of not doing it right at first can be very upsetting.
That's what cervical dislocation is. The cervix is the neck. You're dislocating the head from the body, via the neck.
AFAICT, biologists didn't screw up and give two different body parts the same name. Neck bones are called cervical vertebrae.
> Don't forget to ask for forgiveness
And thank them for their help and for providing you with food.
Great points! I agree with everything you said here with exception to the point about it not being a monetary solution. I've built an "extremely" janky coop for almost no cost in the past. At one point I got absolutely sick of eggs because there were so many than I ended up trading neighbors for other goods. The whole thing ended up making/saving me a ton of money in the end. Let me reiterate how unsafe this coop was however... it was as spacious as it was dangerous (very).
Some other downsides:
- The smell… Chicken crap is horrible. Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies.
- Bye bye garden… My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite.
- Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
If there's a smell then the coop isn't being cleaned enough... simple as that. Ours coop is cleaned every day or two and there's zero smell.
It's like a cat's litter box. If it smells, then clean it more often.
> - Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
The research done was mid at best. They just went "oh yeah there was huge variance in the hobby chicken PFAS data so we took the average". Most of the hobby eggs had little to no PFAS in them.
Furthermore, because of privacy laws, they weren't allowed to know where the eggs came from. They say they found no correlation between PFAS contaminations in eggs and known high PFAS areas but that's actual bullshit if you can't look at location data.
It's absolutely attrocious they were allowed to publish like this and that no one called them on their bullshit.
Overall, unless you are in a place where you know you have high PFAS concentrations, it's most likely fine? You could send off a few eggs for testing to make sure, that's a 200 euro test or something. Do that once per year just to make sure and you should be OK.
> We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
Purportedly the Netherlands, but the research was badly performed.
KNOWN PFAS contamination was around heavy industry, and yeah, if you live near those regions, maybe don't. Otherwise proceed with scepticism and/or some testing.
Netherlands indeed. We live downriver from known contamination in Dordrecht and around heavy industry in Rotterdam area
Everywhere that is never tested. How do you know for sure you are on good soil, and that no contaminated soil was used under your house and garden, which no doubt were levelled before construction started?
This includes feed. Commercial animal foods literally contains waste, such as plastic, due to waste food recycling not being required to be unpacked.
Sure, you _can_ control these things, but more often than not, people don't. Semi commercial hobbyists don't have the money.
We used them to manage the garden. It much easier to put down nets/steel wire around problem areas, then it is to clear out weed and insects, and the chicken bring their own fertilizers to the mix. They are also great at managing grass lawns.
There were several lessons that we learned. Chicken will find dry earth to use as a bath. If one do not want that then you need to remove access and solve the underlying need. They will also dig up seeds and eat seedlings, so any fresh worked soil need to be covered/restricted. They also eat some fruits and herbs, but not others.
In term of total work they did save a lot of time and the garden was in much better shape than before.
I also read something saying that roads are one of the biggest sources of microplastics, with tyre wear, and that being next to one (as most suburban houses are) significantly increases the amount in microplastics in foods grown in backyards. I imagine Chickens would be worse as pollutants tend to accumulate as they go up trophic levels.
Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.
> - 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...
This made me smile very wide, thank you for sharing :-)
"If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them."
Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.
Raising animals to eat for meat is a very different endeavor than raising them for milk/eggs. Especially if you eat meat daily (or more than once a day!), do some mental math on how many animals you'd need to sustain yourself.
Not to mention, raising meat chickens is sad. We've bread them to gorge themselves so they bulk up fast. That results in essentially morbidly obese chickens. We ended up with two on accident and they couldn't even climb the ramp into the coop after a few weeks. The just gorged and sat around in the dirt. It was very sad. Raising non-meat chickens takes a lot longer and the meat output is much lower.
Picture in the following article shows the difference in size of chickens since the 1950s.
see https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/how-chickens-tripled...
It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Anyways, one buck and 2-3 doe rabbits can give you something like 300+ pounds of meat per year. Close to a pound a day would be sufficient for most people. Of course you aren't going to eat only one thing, so you will have other sources of meat for variety
Do you know anyone where this has been the case?
Yes, I know people who raise chickens for dual purpose. There are entire breeds of chickens that are dedicated to dual production.
* gestures to most of recorded history *
Before the industrial revolution, 80% of us worked the land, most familiar with animal agriculture.
This is irrelevant. Do you bring up that before the industrial revolution that grown men used to marry children when people talk about modern views on grooming?
Did you miss the context? The other user questions whether people have ever been unperturbed by slaughter when raising animals. It's a strange sentiment when you consider that historically we have been much, much closer to the animals we consume and intimately familiar with the process of how they get to the table.
>I'm told the eggs taste way better
Can confirm. My dad's cousin is a little bit country and has had meat and egg chickens for years. She comes to visit sometimes, and always brings eggs. Store-bought quite literally pales in comparison, which is to say that the dandelion yellow yolks of store bought eggs have nothing on the rich, flavorful orange-as-a-child's-drawing-of-the-sun yolks from her eggs.
Seems to me another downside is the increased difficulty in traveling. As in, if I want to go away for a few days, I'll have to find someone to feed and water the chickens.
My dad used to have around 15 chickens — but then a fox somehow burrowed under the fence - which was buried in the ground around 20 cm - and slaughtered them all.
Sounds like a classic case of -not the cheapest option, but definitely the most rewarding-. The ethical aspect is a huge plus: knowing exactly how your eggs are produced and giving the chickens a good life.
> not the cheapest option, but definitely the most rewarding
It's not that much more expensive if you were to compare with store-bought eggs that actually match the quality.
My sister has been keeping a coop in her backyard for over a decade now. She got the, because “I find the sound soothing.” (It really is quite nice)
One other advantage is that they will absolutely hoover up the ticks out of a yard. I’ve tried to talk my various friends who move upstate into getting some for this reason… but yeah it’s a couple grand up front and a new hobby.
> 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
Whenever someone mentions how unique you can be with language and come up with amazing unique sentences never uttered by anyone before...I shall think of this
You make no mention of feed cost. Do you just depend upon free range "pecking" in the grass, or kitchen scraps... or what? 13 chickens is a lot of daily feed!
I view the feed cost as being the yin to the egg production's yang. I'm not keeping a spreadsheet, but I do believe they produce more value in eggs than they ingest in feed.
In the warmer months, they also supplement their food from the yard when they eat a lot of grasses and fruits
I also own chickens. Before I got them I thought chickens were pretty stupid animals and wasn't particularly fond of them, but I liked the idea of keeping them for eggs and some entertainment.
I've had mine for about 6 months now and they've totally won me over...
They're far more friendly and intelligent than ever I imagined. Mine love hanging out with me in the garden. One of them is very affectionate and will sometimes decide to sit on my shoulder and is happy to be held. They're all totally different and have very unique personalities which I didn't expect. Their personality will depends a lot on the breed of chicken you get too and some are much more tame than others so it's worth thinking about the type of chicken you want.
I've trained mine to come to me when I whistle which can be super useful when I need to get them back in the run. Obviously you can't train them like dogs, but they're surprisingly smart and will learn things.
They've very curious animals. Mine like to fly up onto my window sill to watch us in the kitchen which is quite sweet.
They'll eat pretty much anything so they're very cheap to keep once you have your coop built. I have 3 (getting a 4th soon) and it's costing us about £3 per month for their feed which makes up about half of their diet, and for that they'll give us about 60-90 eggs. I wouldn't get them for the price of eggs though. If you want to give them a good home it's going to cost you. They're also quite a lot of work. I need to clean mine weekly, feed them daily and provide them general care. Buying an automatic coop door is a good way to reduce some of the hassle of having to let them out and shut them in every day.
I don't eat mammal meat, but I do eat chicken and fish and its been hard for me to eat chicken recently. I'm trying to reduce the amount of chicken I eat in favour of eggs.
Thanks - that's amazing that you have reduced your meat consumption, I really do think we need to take more responsibility and care about animals more. This video converted me, may offer some insights for you too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
The eggs do taste better but that depends on what you are feeding them.
You don't have to eat your chickens, it’s up to you.
predators and rats and avian flu are the tough problems.
The concept is kind of analogous in many ways on if one should have solar power to hedge against power outages. I.e definitely can be worth it but will take up time and investment with long payback period.
To hedge against increasing electric utility prices, maybe. I installed solar recently and the cost of batteries to cover a decent power outage didn’t make sense to me. I just got a transfer switch and a portable propane generator instead. The battery tech / price is just not there yet IMO. And in case this isn’t well known, when there is a power outage and you don’t have battery backup, the solar generation shuts off — you’re not using solar AS the backup in most cases unless you have a very particular setup.
> the cost of batteries to cover a decent power outage didn’t make sense to me.
Are you trying to power your whole house during a power outage, or just a few necessities like a space heater, a few lamps, and maybe a hotplate?
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?
You can kinda tell based on their actions (sometimes). We haven't really needed to bring them to the vet for illness, but once for amputation of an infected + hurt toe. Additionally, if they get parasites (typically mites), they need anti-parasitics. My wife has done a ton of research into identifying chicken issues so she is always on the lookout.
We've had other times where one might appear a bit sluggish, but then the next day are back to normal. Probably ate something bad?
There are several conditions that have visible consequences, such as injuries, malformations, anomalies or a general affectation of their appearance. Plenty of those can be quite disturbing for someone with no experience.
Storey's Guides are a good starting point: tohttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/storeys-guide-to-raising-ch...
How does one travel/vacation if they have chickens? Are they self-managing enough to be left alone for 1-2 weeks a couple times a year?
With room, food, and water, we have left chickens on their own for 2wks. The challenge is keeping clean water and food and predators. We had 30 gallon buckets of water with nipples on the exterior, and food towers (home made). They had the entire interior of our barn.
I wouldn't leave them in a small coupe without a run for that long.
> 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...
A friend of mine complained to me a few years ago that the people in the apartment next to hers were raising a chicken. The crowing woke her up in the morning. But she consoled herself that soon enough they'd eat it.
I was pretty amused at the whole idea of raising a chicken inside an apartment.
> 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.
Check your local regulations. Keeping roosters (adult male chickens) in many city areas is actually illegal; i.e. against the byelaws. It is considered antisocial because of the noise that they make and the early hours when they make it. i.e. literally "at cockcrow"
If only it was only the early hours. The damn things scream pretty much all the time. I've had two neighbors over the years that accidentally kept roosters.
So, if you want to keep backyard chickens, save yourself the trouble and get the red sex linked chicks. They are hybrids whose color is very reliably determined by color, so you can be pretty sure you aren't getting a rooster chick.
It's either that or brace yourself for the process of turning the occasion young rooster into fried chicken before it gets too obstreperous.
My friend had a racist rooster who abused the brown chickens and got along with the white ones.
He traded it in for a more "woke" one.
Your hypothetical children may tell stories for decades about how they were the ones who had to scoop the poop into the outdoor composting area and that the strong smell of urea lives with them to this day.
uh, speaking hypothetically and not at all of our own family chicken adventure when I was a kid/teen.
Also, if you have to kill a chicken, study how to do it and practice beforehand. Botching it will also live with you - I learned this one the hard way.
All that said, I'm glad I had the experience of (helping) raise chickens. It was an adventure, and the eggs were great. I've pondered it on and off again as an adult but have thus far resisted the temptation.
> - 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...
Isn't the more likely case that they shit everywhere but the family loves them so much they won't let you put it back outside?
Ignorant question: why might one need to euthanize a chicken?
I think typically as a solution to serious injury (e.g. result of a predator attack or otherwise) that can't be mended.
In my case, we had too many roosters and their competitive/protective behaviour was causing serious injuries to the hens, so we had to make the tough decision to reduce their numbers. Being in the middle of nowhere, there weren't many options for the rooster in question, so it seemed like the most humane thing to do at the time.
A big upside; with chickens you have the best possible composting system. They will eat almost all food waste. (but, please be careful to avoid the small number of foods which are unhealthy for chickens) And, they turn that waste into compost. Depending on volume, they can also completely handle leaves, grass clippings, and other yard waste. For leaves, they love to scratch through them and will poop on them. They'll break down the leaves in record time.
"Predators, foxes and hawks, you need defenses"
This one is something I think people maybe don't consider. My brother has chickens, they have a coop but pretty much have the run of his property in a rural area. He has had to kill a coyote and a bob cat so far. Not a reason not to get them, but something to consider before doing so.
> 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 can become quite tame. They can purr.
Chickens are ruthless and will not hesitate for a moment to kill and then cannibalize their coop mates. The best way to avoid it is to have a single breed as they tend to start by attacking anything different, literally spots or discolorations, on other birds.
Yes, chickens will eat other chickens.
> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them.
All eggs taste the same. Which is great because eggs taste great.
> 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...
Chickens are filthy animals and the thought of having one indoors is disgusting.
You write in absolutes when talking about your own opinion as if it's generally accepted to be a fact, which makes even interesting looking bits look suspicious when you encounter something clearly biased.
Cannibalistic behavior in chickens is not an opinion: https://extension.psu.edu/poultry-cannibalism-prevention-and...
It’s one of the reasons factory farms clip the beaks.
And regarding egg taste, have fun reading this: https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs
I generally agree with what you are saying, however I'm quite surprised at the pushback about homegrown eggs tasting better than mass-produced.
Send me as many papers as you want, but respectfully, I have empirically tasted the difference. I have no interest on imposing my opinion on anyone, but to me it's pretty obvious and easy to understand and accept that a better fed, better cared for chicken will produce better eggs.
A bit like with Wagyu steak, no?
> I generally agree with what you are saying, however I'm quite surprised at the pushback about homegrown eggs tasting better than mass-produced.
There have been many studies on this and in true blind tests people do not prefer one over the other. The Kenji tests are interesting as he even dyes the eggs green to prevent the color from giving it away.
> Send me as many papers as you want, but respectfully, I have empirically tasted the difference.
You think it tastes better because you know the provenance of the egg. It's like a placebo effect. Try your own blind study and see if you can actually tell the difference.
> I have no interest on imposing my opinion on anyone, but to me it's pretty obvious and easy to understand and accept that a better fed, better cared for chicken will produce better eggs.
There's plenty of non-taste reasons that they're better. You might care about the welfare of the animal. And the vitamins or balance of fatty acids might be different. But they all taste the same.
> A bit like with Wagyu steak, no?
A Wagyu would be significantly more marbled than your off the shelf USDA Choice steak. So of course it would taste different. The balance of protein v.s. fats and distribution throughout the meat would be completely different.
I'm not the person you are replying to, but I have empirically not tasted the difference. The only difference between store bought eggs and farm fresh ones is that the yolk is vividly yellow on the ones from the farm. I am willing to bet that the people who taste a difference are imagining it because of the superior aesthetics, and that they wouldn't taste anything different in a double blind taste test. Which is fine, nothing wrong with the placebo effect. But I don't think there's any substance to the claim that the eggs actually taste better.
good luck with this
how hard would it be to break even with 200 chickens in a typical European town (excluding land costs)? i am just imagining if a small company decides to raise its own chickens-eggs for lunch time...
Inside the house? How? They shit wherever they happen to be ...
"We can't build a bigger coop - Joey's going into soup."
I’ve hear another downside is the sheer amount of poop to clean up.
you mean free fertilizer to gather and use.
> - 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?
> Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent.
I hated chickens, the only animal I may have disliked more were sheep and that’s only because sheep are so unbelievably annoying.
Chickens to me were nothing more than noisy garbage disposals.
This feels like an insane proposition to me, I'll explain:
1. Soaring egg prices are due to culling + deaths related to the proliferation of H5N1 (Avian Flu).
2. The reason we have been proactively culling is to minimize spread AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, to minimize the number of exposures H5N1 could have to Humans.
3. The reason we want to minimize exposure between chickens and humans is because each exposure of an infected chicken to a human is an opportunity for the virus to jump host, and adapt to better transmit amongst humans. The mutation (mammalian adaptation of the virus) can happen in the chicken before it jumps to a passing by human, or in the human once infected with the virus.
We are only a few minor adaptations away from this thing being BOTH extremely deadly AND extremely transmissible between humans. Worst case scenario. The latest strands found in Canada and now Nevada are extremely deadly, and just need the Human to Human adaptation. With enough at bats, it will have it.
The idea of dramatically increasing the number of humans exposed to sick flocks by having people start their own backyard chicken coops feels suicidal, for humanity.
The latest hospitalized patient in Georgia was exposed through a backyard flock, by the way.
20 years ago, Thailand almost overnight got rid of backyard chicken farms:
> Perhaps the biggest and most lasting change, Auewarakul says, is that this outbreak abruptly accelerated the transition from backyard chicken farmers to large-scale industrialized poultry farms. He says this was a big cultural transition since chickens had been part of everyday life for many Thai families. [...]
> The shift to these industrialized farms has not fully eliminated avian flu in chickens, but the disease has been largely contained. With ongoing monitoring, cases are often identified early and dealt with before the virus can gain a foothold.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/06/12/g-s1-...
Throughout entire human and chicken collective history we somehow haven’t managed to get wiped out by chicken transmitted decease - and suddenly its practically imminent and only massive mega farms can keeps us safe.
A thought occurs - perhaps it’s the mega farming that is the root of this problem and having some backyard chickens won’t really move the needle any closer to doom?
What has changed is the population density of humans. Disease outbreaks aren't at thing you can understand by summing all the disease vectors.
There is no needle - it only takes one case. While a megafarm may be a bigger vector, it can be quarantined, whereas everyone having backyard farms can not.
Major diseases have been a part of human history throughout. There is no evidence that mega farming is making it worse.
Farming changed radically after the 1950s, so pretty recently. It's pretty reasonable to believe it will. If you've been anywhere near mega livestock operations of any kind then you would know.
Why?
The biosecurity protocols are nonexistent with most backyard coops.
Let's say I have a few chickens in my backyard that don't have bird flu, and we (myself or my chickens) never come into contact with any other chickens.
Aren't we safe? If not, what are the possible vectors? Is it from random birds flying in my yard? My visits to grocery stores?
No, you're not safe if your chickens are exposed to wild birds. If they're outside feeding on seed that other wild birds also have access to they're at risk.
Other comments mentioned wild birds, but lots of animals can spread bird flu. House cats, for example.
Edit: link (gift NYT link) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/cdc-bird-flu-cats-...
The chickens can get sick from bird droppings, from birds that fly over your chicken run and never even come into direct contact with the flock.
Your birds could get sick from other birds. It doesn't just affect chickens. I'd exercise precautions with your birds. Both to keep them quarantined from wild birds and keep yourself and family quarantined.
> The reason we have been proactively culling is to minimize spread AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, to minimize the number of exposures H5N1 could have to Humans.
The reason the US has been culling is because they refuse to vaccinate chickens. Even China began vaccinations in 2004 ... over 2 decades ago.
Perhaps that's why Chinese chicken eggs cost:
3,062 CNY/T -> $422/tonne -> $0.287/dozen @ 24 oz / dozen large eggs [1]
while US eggs are still nonsensically priced at $8.03 / dozen. [2] Like worldwide logistics doesn't even exist. Seems like a market discrepancy when there's several 100 to 1000 cargo ships transiting the Pacific currently that might be loaded with 3,062 CNY/T ($0.29/dozen) eggs.
Here's a rabbit hole to go down:
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/caring/index.html
What is a "150-day fallow"?
It means waiting 150 days after eliminating all the chickens in an area for any virus remaining in that area to no longer be viable.
I mean, it'd be absolutely awful if we started having to deal w/ autistic chickens. I can't imagine how the Chinese do it.
Sarcasm aside, if the US isn't vaccinating our birds, what are the drivers for that? Cost concerns?
Not exactly cost concerns but it’s definitely economic in nature. The US exports a lot of poultry (broilers, not eggs) and the importers test for avian flu with tests that are incapable of differentiating between a vaccinated bird and an infected one. If we were to vaccinate our birds, the broiler farmers would lose access to the much more lucrative export markets. Since the market is so competitive domestically, that would essentially spell the end for much of the industry (which is a national security concern, aka never gonna happen).
Instead the US performs cullings and reimburses the farmers, which has the knock on effect of wiping out all the egg laying hens our own domestic market depends on to protect the broiler export markets.
So the cost of "162,770,988 poultry affected as of 2/20/2025" is less than the cost of loss of export of chickens or of developing a better test?
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html?co...
I can believe the export market is much larger than the number of chickens killed so far, but the cost of developing a better test seems likely to be lower, especially given future outbreaks.
Probably cost previously, certainly ideology now
> With enough at bats, it will have it.
viral pun
hahah totally!
We have a backyard flock where the run and coop are completely enclosed. So in theory they should be more protected given that no birds or critters can get into that space to give my chickens bird flu.
That being said, I have no faith in the Trump government to do the right things required to stop the spread of this and I feel like we are pretty screwed either ways.
Unfortunately, you backyard flock is not protected. It's airborne, is suspected to be infectious up to 5km between farm sites, and also can be contracted via fomite transmission. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your birds will likely get infected at some point in the coming 18 months, or sooner, and can be a real attack vector for something nasty for you and your family. The latest mutation across herds in Nevada/Canada both in birds and cows has a real nasty adaptation (D1.1) which has a suspected mortality rate in humans around 50%. Several hospitalizations in humans related to this specific mutation, acquired by individuals dealing with backyard flocks. The logic that your backyard flock mesh is sufficient to protect the flock and you from this pretty nasty bug isn't supported by the evidence we're seeing pan out across the country/world.
Another worrisome attack vector is cats, but that's a whole other pandoras box we'll leave alone for now.
To get an idea of how transmissible/infectious this thing is, it has jumped from birds in Asia, to dolphins in florida, and has eradicated entire populations of seals in latin america, cows, cats, ferrets, rats globally, to almost all bird populations in Antarctica. There is no species / geographic radius that will likely to unaffected. The death rate in each species may vary considerably (cows in US as an example, don't seem to die in great numbers), but it is highly transmissible even between species.
I'm sorry these aren't the best sources, but I'm in a rush and wanted to help you get an idea of what we're dealign with here in the context of your backyard flock, specifically. If you keep digging in all of the themes above you'll find even better sources:
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-02-20/...
https://scar.org/library-data/avian-flu
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/m1218-h5n1-flu.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06173-x
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06173-x
https://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/news/catastrophic-mortality-e...
Your sample size of one isn't that relevant to the previous comment.
That wasn't a sample though, it was a hypothesis. (And it brings the question: do cages help?)
Wouldn't that situation be fairly common for backyard chickens? I feel like most people who keep chickens in their backyard aren't going to have contact with other chickens.
The exception would be a neighborhood/community where a lot of people have backyard chickens. But even then, wouldn't the chance of infection still be low?
The risk it outside wild birds. If you have feed on the ground and wild birds are also eating it (and pooping on it), your Chickens could be infected.
It's not chicken flu, it's avian flu. You have to control for contact with all birds. I have a neighbor with chickens. They aren't always cooped up so they often mix with the wild pigeons and mourning doves. Even still, they just have simple cages that can be pecked/pooped through.
Completely enclosed runs and coops are very much the exception to the rule. Most backyard chickens are just fenced off (they can't really fly after all), meaning they're exposed to other birds.
[flagged]
yeah... people keeping chickens would be humanity committing suicide.. seems legit :) the last few thousand years of prior art might beg to differ
Certainly not all humans at the same time, but yes the classical scourge diseases that have killed millions throughout history have zoonotic origins due to living closely with animals.
The letter from Farm Action, linked at the top of the article, is pretty compelling in making their case.
A few highlights:
> As a result of the smaller flock, egg production has dropped slightly from 8.1 billion eggs per month in 2021 to 7.75 billion eggs per month in December 2024. Importantly, however, per capita production of eggs in the U.S. has not dipped below per capita consumption of eggs in any year between 2022 and the present. Meanwhile, the total value of egg production has risen significantly, from $8.8 billion in 2021 to $19.4 billion in 2022 and $17.9 billion in 2023.
Note the $17.9B 2023 figure obviously doesn't include the most recent price increases.
> Instead of using the windfall profits they are earning from record egg prices to rebuild or expand their egg-laying flocks, the largest egg producers are using them to buy up smaller rivals and further consolidate market power.
> Almost all shell eggs are marketed through contracts between producer firms and chain buyers where egg prices are based on weekly wholesale quotes published by Urner Barry, an industry consulting and data analytics firm. According to leading industry commentator Simon M. Shane, this convergence "on a single commercial price discovery system constitutes an impediment to a free market," with the benchmark prices released by Urner Barry potentially serving to amplify price swings led by the largest-volume producers and to prevent independent, competitive decision making by others.
Much of the rise in prices has occurred in January and February. Seems likely to me that culling has continued due to bird flu and production has dropped.
I would also guess that demand is fairly constant for eggs, so large changes in price are needed to deter a small number of consumers from buying (low elasticity of demand).
"rebuilding" a laying flock is a fairly quick change, if the infrastructure is already there.
> per capita production of eggs in the U.S. has not dipped below per capita consumption of eggs in any year between 2022 and the present
Because people can't buy eggs that don't exist.
Imports?
Good point. I didn't imagine a lot of egg imports happened.
I worked at a large 3PL during an avian flu about 10 years ago. We gained a large customer because we gave them a plan to import huge quantities of eggs from overseas (mostly Europe) via ship. Managing them through ports in both ends and over the road across the country, eggs still in shells, needing constant refrigeration and unbroken chain of documentation was a monumental task. It kept them in business egg with their largest retailers, but I’m still not sure it was worth the expense/effort.
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.
US has an egg import deal with Turkey, no? https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/turkey-export...
The article is dated today, it may not yet be affecting prices.
Sounds like collusion through a third party. Similar to the landlords all signing up to the same pricing service.
Same play as the meat industry leveraging "data analytics" to fix and sort at https://www.agristats.com/.
[1]https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/four-states-join-jus...
[2]https://farmaction.us/2023/10/12/food-price-fixing-is-still-...
Corporate greed back at it again!
Wow! 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 documentary follow up to "Supersize me", and it looked like the chicken "mafia" controlled the business.[3]
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=eggs&inpu... [2] https://groceries.asda.com/search/eggs [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken!
Some data points from Lexington, KY, USA:
18 eggs today (February 20th, 2024): $8.19 [0]
18 eggs ~1 year ago (March 2nd, 2024): $3.34 [1]
18 eggs a tiny bit over a year ago (February 2nd, 2024): $2.74 [2]
18 eggs, oldest order I can find (April 9th, 2023): $2.33 [3]
A 2.5x increase in a years time. Just insane
[0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/05JYvxsf
[1] https://cs.joshstrange.com/lVlCFcRs
That is expensive.
Typically at Costco, 5 dozen eggs is under $12, sometimes as low as $8. Currently it is closer to $20, which is about your price.
Canada Costco sells 24 eggs for $6.79 CAD.
$3.50 for 12 off-brand is available in grocers
Google says today $6.79 CAD is $4.78 USD or ~0.20/egg USD
Just for the sake of sharing prices in the context of North America— in Mexico 12 eggs go for $2.21 [1], 18 for $2.46 [2] and 30 for $4.90 [3]. This is just a normal supermarket, and the brand is just a common local one, not the cheapest and not the most expensive.
[1] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-12-piezas/65002...
[2] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-18-piezas/39041...
[3] https://www.soriana.com/huevo-blanco-bachoco-30-piezas/65002...
Okay, so update - we went to the local Morrisons (another chain) over lunch and got 18 eggs (they are sold from trays that you box yourself, but we just took half a tray) for £5.40 (so, what? US$6.82) The eggs are sold by the egg too, 0.30 each, so we could have bought any number we wanted really. They are also free-range. Remember too, in Europe eggs don't need to be refrigerated because we don't treat then to remove the outer layer.
Europe vaccinates their chickens for salmonella I think (vs pasteurization in the states). They might be vaccinating them for bird flu as well, the USA just culls an entire flock if they find an infection in the flock.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare Costco prices with local grocery store prices. Not apples to apples
Yeah but I don't think those are even near being free-range.
The US has some awful widespread practices for their livestock.
The egg story in the US is so strange to me. I just checked my local "premium" (Pacific Northwest) grocery store, and free range eggs are $4/dozen. (https://townandcountrymarkets.com/shop#!/?id=156440568471307...) I guess US food desert type areas are paying much more from the media surrounding this, but even that price comes with a warning on the website that egg supplies are limited, and presumably therefore the price would be lower in times of higher supply.
I have chickens, and the cost including amortization of their real estate puts family eggs at something like $12/dozen.
The town and country near me is $4.99, so maybe it is more expensive here in Ballard. But the weird thing is that the non-organic/free-range eggs at QFC are $6.99/dozen and they have the same $4.99 dozen that Town and Country has.
Hmm. After Spurlock lied through his teeth in his first film, why would anyone trust him ever again?
Spurlock can be a fraud and the food market still be controlled by a cartel — both can be true at the same time. I’m no US citizen so I don’t really care but what I read about your potato market was wild, so I wouldn’t be surprised if eggs are also controlled by a cartel.
That’s as may be, but if Spurlock is a fraud then you need to provide more substantial evidence than whatever Spurlock says. That’s kind of the point I was making, actually. Supporting your thesis with evidence from a known and provable liar pretty much undermines your thesis in its entirety. So, maybe don’t do that?
"lied through his teeth" isn't an accurate description. His openness about his history of drunking wasn't ideal and did damage his credibility. However other people have partially reproduced the health effects of what he did and his level of drinking is pretty common in the USA so it's not like he's some crazy outlier.
> His openness about his history of drunking wasn't ideal and did damage his credibility.
That’s a euphemism if ever there was one. He was a raging alcoholic, and his alcohol consumption (which he denied entirely) accounted for pretty much all of his negative health effects during the film.
> However other people have partially reproduced the health effects of what he did
But nobody has been able to reproduce it entirely, or even account for the weight gain and ill health effects he experienced based solely on his food consumption. And several people recreated his stunt and were perfectly fine, or even had their health improve. It’s not about what food you eat, it’s about how much and your overall lifestyle.
> and his level of drinking is pretty common in the USA so it's not like he's some crazy outlier.
He was reportedly drinking a fifth of vodka per day. That is excessive by any metric.
Fifth would be 150 ml, so around 3 shots. It’s slightly excessive but I wouldn’t call that raging alcoholism level.
A “fifth” of alcohol is a 750ml bottle (about a fifth of a gallon). So someone drinking a fifth is drinking more like 15 shots.
Where are you getting that measurement from? A fifth is 750ml, basically a standard sized bottle.
Lol my mistake, I thought it was a fifth of that bottle.
Well he’s dead now so I guess they never will.
Yeah, it's really hard for me to understand the thing with eggs. Do people really buy that many eggs? We're a family of 5, cook every day (never buy takeout) and consume, maybe, 6 eggs a month? when we bake cakes? which we do extremely rarely.
We only cook for diner as we don't eat breakfast and everyone's out of the house for lunch, so that may be a reason, but still. It seems a very minor and unimportant ingredient.
> we don't eat breakfast
Eggs are a traditional breakfast/brunch food. Quite a few people have an egg (or two) every single day.
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.
I picked up a dozen for $3.99 last night at a major chain grocery store, too. They had plenty of eggs in stock and I was there around 9pm. I've seen the insanity at Costco first hand so I've stopped buying milk and eggs from there until that sorts itself out
Costco is culturally insane. There's a certain kind of person (cough prepper cough) that shops at Costco; these people hear one whiff of societal instability and they immediately buy ten dozen eggs, manage to eat half of them, and then throw the other half out. Its super cringe and its the reason why I cancelled my Costco membership last year.
Meanwhile you just go to a Kroger or Walmart down the street, pay nearly the same price, and they always have stock. It was the same thing with toilet paper early in the pandemic; we swing by Costco, utter madhouse, line out the door, everyone has cartfulls of toilet paper. I tell my friend "lets skip this and go try Target" -> Shelves weren't fully stocked, but they had some, no crazy crowds, we're good and the butts are clean.
Costco's prices aren't even that spectacularly great anymore, especially once you factor in the membership, and if you do a little legwork on coupon clipping (which is so easy nowadays with all the apps). E.g. the Kroger near me almost always has meat like 30% off on Fridays because, idk, its nearing the last day they can sell it or something. Stock up for the week then, way cheaper than even Costco.
The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemics, which also means that this is the least indicated time to get a backyard chicken. The US should have dropped battery caging, like the rest of the world did 15 years ago.
Is H5N1 the cause of current egg prices, or an excuse? From the article:
Egg prices may be impacted for reasons beyond the scarcity of laying hens due to bird flu. Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, has written to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, requesting an investigation into “potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination” by the egg industry. “While avian flu has been cited as the primary driver of skyrocketing egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal,” the group wrote. “Instead, dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power.
I wonder if spreading the chickens out to all the backyards would prevent spread due to lower density, or if you'd get spread via wild animals anyhow and now it's just impossible to contain and more people are at direct risk.
It certainly would but still it would have to be a controlled and regulated environment. I honestly would not want to have chicken near me in this particular moment especially considering who is the secretary of health. The USA really are playing with fire.
> The egg price is due to the H5N1 epidemic
No, it's not. But that's what the egg companies want you to believe. In truth the number of egg laying hens is only down about 5% total since the beginning of the epidemic.
You don't know the elasticity of the market. I can imagine restaurants, food producers and consumers are very eager to get their weekly box of eggs. So even a 5% drop can cause a price jump that's way more.
Actually we do sort of know from the 2014-15 avian flu. In the 2014-15 avian flu, a 12 percent decrease of egg-laying hens was accompanied by a 220% price increase in 2014-15:
- https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-... - https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2015/06/economic-implicati...
Compare that to the current epidemic in which a 5 percent decrease of egg-laying hens is accompanied by a 600%+ price increase.
Oh FFS the conspiracy of the egg companies it's a new low.
160M chickens were found affected so far. More culled.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/data-map-comm...
Most chicken in the USA are raised for meat. There are only 300 millions that are raised for eggs laying so those numbers are staggering.
The size of the EGG LAYING population of chickens is only down 5% since the beginning of the epidemic.
160M chickens with "more culled" is not correct. 115M of those affected have been culled.
Furthermore it doesn't make sense to talk about absolute numbers culled over the course of years when the rate of replenishment of the egg layers is on a shorter time horizon (chicks grow to egg laying maturity in just a few months, which is why we saw a total recovery from the 2015 avian flu in just eight months). That's why it makes more sense to do a year to year comparison of the size of the egg laying population.
If your theory is that the bird flu has decimated the egg laying hen population and therefore egg production is down a staggering amount, answer the following question and decide whether the number is staggering:
How many eggs were produced in Jan 2021? How many eggs were produced in Jan 2025?
California, which dropped battery caging years ago, has been on of the states most hard hit. The real reason is that the US doesn't vaccinate it's chickens, which it mostly doesn't do because if it did, it couldn't export to several countries.
Only France in Europe vaccinate its chicken yet we still have normal prices. This is not the issue but merely the fact that 70% of chicken in the USA are battery caged plus a protectionist market that does not allow imports.
Can you tell more ? Why does vaccination prevents export ?
> Most U.S. trading partners won't accept exports from countries that allow vaccinations due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the virus.
For what it's worth, America also bans vaccinated poultry imports. There were talks by the USDA to relax the ban when it comes to live animals, but I don't know if it passed.
Same epidemic in Japan, egg shortages have been. A thing but the prices have hardly changed ?
You do realize that a lot of people don't buy the H5N1 epidemic thing, right?
Certainly easy to perpetuate insane conspiracy theories like this when the anti-science administration is no longer collecting stats on infectious diseases.
To save money? Absolutely not. I'm keeping a spreadsheet on our 20 chickens this year. They're young, so input is very high while output is still ramping but I'm guessing it's $7-8 dozen in food costs alone (the highest end organic feed tho), never mind the initial buyin.
> the highest end organic feed tho
Maybe feed them your food scraps? Or bulk buy and prepare your own grains/pulses?
It's a recent experiment, we were on the more reasonably priced organic feed until I discovered my local feed store had this stuff over the holidays, so we're trying it out. The quality of the eggs is absolutely miles above what I already considered really good eggs though.
I'll probably get around to making our own someday, but I'm not there just yet.
I've seen someone just chuck a load of split peas in a plastic barrel and submerge with rain water. It naturally ferments with occasional agitation and this is supposed to be good for the chickens. So not so hard to do when you get to that point of wanting to try it.
That sounds like the level of effort I'm after, thanks neighbor.
Yeah "fermented chicken feed" is the search term you are after and it really does work with all kinds of grains and chickens love it.
> The quality of the eggs is absolutely miles above what I already considered really good eggs though.
I must drive past a dozen (lol) honesty boxes on the way to work offering the sale of eggs and this is my general experience as well.
Its amazing how individuals can produce and sell a product as cheap if not cheaper than mega corps with such staggeringly different quality.
We have fresh egg vending machines along the road by farms in the Netherlands!
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/ne3ivw/i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Ui4zmqyxY
https://www.fietsnetwerk.nl/en/places/farmers-vending-machin...
https://www.deboeropautomaat.nl
Here's a German company that will sell you your own egg vending machine:
https://vendy1.de/en/blog/egg-vending-machines/?srsltid=AfmB...
I'm sure drive-through egg vending machines would be popular in the US! (And drive-by egg delivery too.)
These vending machines exist where few people are
I mean if you add everything up - land value, labour, food costs, etc - I'm fairly sure they're selling eggs at a net loss, however, it's not a capitalist endeavour unlike the industrial production. And IMO that is the key difference, that is, they produce for themselves and sell the excess and earn some money off of it, it's not their primary goal to do so.
Or they're using "surplus" resources (like their backyard, and domestic food scraps) that they'd still have otherwise. Which is something that is not commercially scalable. Unless, I guess, someone tries "Uber but for chickens".
Exactly, even with it being excess, I think the motivation is to reduce waste versus produce money in these situations. They have uses for the waste, it can be eaten by an animal, but that’s also true if it doesn’t get sold
This makes me wonder - would chickens grow more efficiently if you cook their food for them?
When we invented cooking it gave us a massive advantage because of the nutritional efficiency, yet we feed animals just random raw stuff. Would feeding them porridge instead of grain lead to higher output?
> When we invented cooking it gave us a massive advantage because of the nutritional efficiency,
I was reasonably confident cooking reduced nutrition but reduced food-based disease way more.
What makes you reasonably confident? Cooking leading to better nutrient absorption and our IQ growth is mainstream science so making a wild contradiction like that without something to back it up isn't very helpful. Helping with food-based illness is an interesting thought though.
Your proposal may give interesting results in a couple hundred generations of chickens, when evolution has had some time to take profit of the cooked food. But, concerning the hens that lay the eggs I'm supposed to eat, please refrain from experimenting with them, thanks!
My chickens feed is a grain mix that can be boiled or even fermented, often called silage with the larger livestock.
The chickens love some warm mash on a cold day like today, they'll get some yogurt too.
We have 10 (backyard) chickens and spend about $40/mo in feed. We average about five eggs per day when they are laying, so let's say that's 150 eggs per month. That's $0.26/egg or $3.20 a dozen.
But we have to factor in around 4 months of them not laying during the winter. So for laying months, that brings the feed price to around $60/mo or $4.80 a dozen.
So yeah, at current prices, it's worth it for us. I also haven't factored in the value of their compost, which is really quite expensive when you're buying as much as they generate, so it's probably even cheaper than listed.
FWIW, you can get generally better results with different breeds. Golden Comets or ISA Browns will typically get you 1 per day per chicken. In reality if you had 10 you'd likely get 8 or 9 per day. They also seem to lay in the winter better than many. Unfortunately they just don't live long so it's a constant cycling process.
Out of curiosity why not grow your own feed?
In many cases you can cycle the compost back in to the feed you grow (as fertilizer).
Around here our eggs are averaging about $9 per 12 on the shelves, and you can't buy just 12, the only eggs on the shelf are the 18/24 packs so about $20-22 per pack, almost the same price as choice meat.
The labour and land step up from tending chickens to growing grain is a very large step. If you are organized enough to grow grain, and you're near a farming area, you'd be farther ahead to try to buy right off the field grain at harvest time for cash. Mechanized grain harvesting is an immense labour saver that is unavailable to people growing feed for backyard chickens.
It's two 40lb bags. We don't have enough square feet to grow that much feed per month (and still have room for the other stuff we grow).
I don't know how accurate this is, but there was a youtube video from some homesteader I accidentally ran across saying you can ferment the feed to a mash, and the chickens will eat/need less.
How much land would you need to grow that much grain? Probably a lot more than most backyard chicken flock owners have.
Chickens will eat grain, but the best eggs (and healthiest chickens) come from lots of protein and green leafy matter. Vermiculture and simple insect attraction methods like maggot buckets, food scraps, and lawn/garden waste can go a long way with chickens.
I don't think they get a lot of calories out of greens, do they? I feed mine all sorts of scraps, but they also eat a lot of grain.
"Around here our eggs are averaging about $9 per 12 on the shelves, "
What state are you in, that's crazy pricing. Article says, "Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen—an all time-record." So you are stuck 2x the national average price.
What is the amount of time required for all the different chicken activities? (estimated weekly average)
Yeah, the daily tasks are pretty small. Just a few minutes a day. Scoop some food, change out the water, gather the eggs.
Every so often, you need to do bigger chores, like go buy fees or fix something in your setup. A couple times a year you need to do a deep clean of the coop (throw out all the straw, scrape any poo that's collected on the floor or wherever, put in clean straw). Sometimes a chicken dies, and that's not fun, but it is something you have dispose of properly.
Ultimately, though, it's a hobby. It should be fun or relaxing most of the time or else it's not worth it. Like gardening or running a home server. If you're trying to just save money, maybe you can save a tiny bit in this particular moment, but there are surely better ways to save a few bucks.
What are your thoughts on a more communal approach? Say we have a neighborhood of 20 single family homes that all participate in tending a large garden and raising chickens. Would the cost and chore time drop to a level where it was saving all involved enough money to justify the effort?
I ask because I used to have a good sized garden at my old house, growing enough veggies to both preserve and distribute to neighbors because I grossly underestimated the yield. While it was nice to have the neighbors love me, it was also a lot more work than I had bargained for (especially when otherwise working 40+ hours per week) and it got me thinking about community gardens and whatnot, why those might make more sense these days
When four roommates often can't keep the kitchen sink clean of dishes, I wonder how a 20-home communal coop would work without creating politics and resentment.
Great, the guy who "cleans" the coop when it's his turn by gently sweeping it for two minutes just swiped all of the eggs again.
I always thought it was silly that everyone in the suburbs owns their own lawn mower, edger, and weed whacker. Why not have a communal shed on every cul-de-sac? ...Until I lended tools out to people and saw how they treated them.
I'd think most of the time you'd need some sort of oversight structure just to manage people.
Community projects like this can operate successfully, but they do take work (like intentional communication and meetings), and there are politics. If we're envisioning 20 houses, yeah, there probably needs to be some kind of structure.
Since you mentioned the suburbs specifically, I'll also note that, at least imo, that: - the suburbs are designed in such a way as to encourage atomized, isolated living (houses are relatively far a part, you usually need a car to get anywhere, fenced-in yards are the norm, etc). - presumably people are moving out to the suburbs because they find that lifestyle appealing, so there's some self-selection happening such that people in the suburbs are less interested in sharing stuff communally.
So if you were just trying to get 20 households that happen to live closest to you involved, it probably is too big a committment for them.
Everyone just has to opt-in to it and remain opted in. That's a completely different community building problem, but it's still a problem. If you succeed at it you trade off the cost of "doing all the chores" with the cost of "keeping the community running" (unless you are graced with someone else in the community who is interested + able + better at it than you are) so you don't generally come out ahead (but it's worlds better for sustainability if you can build up something like that).
I was actually a member of a "cohousing" community for a while, which is similar to what you describe. If you're not familiar with the concept, I recommend looking into it, as I think you'd find it appealing: https://www.cohousing.org/
I'd still say that if the primary goal is saving money, there are better options to consider. If there are 20 single family homes living the "default" lifestyle of such a home, there are probably more than 20 cars (probably approaching 40). Can this community work out a system of sharing cars (and the costs associated with those cars)? How few cars can this group of people reasonably get by with if they are sharing?
Another option is having one big tool shed where everything inside is shared. Each single family home, by default, would probably own their own lawn mower. But a community of 20 households probably only needs to own one or two.
That said, I think there are other benefits of a big community project like a community chicken coop. It's good for building relationships with other people, it's fun, and the eggs do taste good. You could draw up a simple calendar and decide who is responsible for taking care of the chickens each day if you wanted, and that'd probably make things easy (although, tbh, one or two people will probably need to be "in charge" of the chicken coop, and following up if something falls through the cracks). A community chicken coop also makes it much easier to take a week-long vacation or whatever, because you know that someone will take care of things. When we had a chicken coop (in our single family house, not part of a larger community), finding someone to care for it was kind of a large task before we could actually leave our home for an extended amount of time.
Once you have it set up, I'd say no more than about 2 hours per week. The feeding and watering can be automated, so it's really just whatever cleaning or optional shuffling of their locations you do. Checking for eggs can be done in a few minutes, and you technically don't have to do it every single day. You might actually choose to spend more than the minimum to tame them and treat them as pets.
Yeah, I'd say two hours a week, maybe an hour. Feeding and watering and checking for eggs can be done quite quickly when it's below freezing out :)
Yeah, definitely not a money-saver, especially with high-quality feed
You're feeding them the wrong stuff. They can live off of cracked corn and whatever stale bread and vegetables you toss them, as well as bugs in their general vicinity. As for the initial buy, they can turn over a new generation in about 3 weeks. You can also eat the old chickens. You're looking at it wrong.
Because I'm not looking at it the way you look at it? Been at it for ten years and am perfectly happy with how it's been going.
The spreadsheet in isolation view does seem odd to farming types.
We have chickens, my father's still looking after them and he's had chooks since his birth in 1935 .. along with at least 10 fruit trees on any property we've had, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, pumpkins, and all the usual stuff that you can sow and that grows pretty well on its own (we've all had other jobs .. but this all stems from either growing acres of grain in some wings of the family or raising cattle in remote parts of Australia far from regular shops).
Point being, chickens do well on picking through big piles of rotting down compost from everything else so feed costs are low, return on having chicken shit turned into soil that can be used for the next garden bed is high, value of having bugs kept in check is saving on sprays, etc.
By all means keep a spreadsheet, I'm fond of them also, but having had chooks for decades we see them more as an integrated component of a bigger picture.
Your post got me thinking about where I am right now in my life. We’re planning how we want to retire and recently bought an old home that has a smattering of produce trees. Citrus, olives, figs, and walnuts. Learning how to deal with them (with help from the neighbors) has been stressful, but also very satisfying after mainly being in front of a computer for 20+ years.
The ideal flow is investing a lot of time in (say) the first two or three years (three full season cycles gives you a fair amount of exposure) getting the swing of watering, planting, sowing, gathering waste, etc.
With any luck you can then transition into barely spending an hour at most a day (on most days) keeping things ticking along .. bursts of weeding, pruning, turning soil as needed and letting the plants do the work.
It's good steady exercise keeping on top of a substantial but "small" home garden but it doesn't have to suck up all your time once you get the swing of it.
I'm fortunate the prior owners have most things setup. They were older so some of the maintenance around trimming is behind, but I am learning. My problem now is, I don't know what to do with all the oranges. I've been giving them to the local restaurants in town, but I don't think they even want any more. Good problem to have I guess :) Next up is learning how to make marmalade.
You should have a deep chest or big standing freezer away from the kitchen for long term storage .. somewhere cool that it can do fine in for six hours+ if you lose power.
Oranges, yep - marmalade (castor sugar + other stuff, and jars) OR skin | cut away peel and pulp, save juice and freeze for later in the year; drinking ot adding to cakes, etc.
Lazy cooking == slow cookers once every two weeks or so, make a lot of vegetable stir fry and pacage and freeze, chicken and vegetables ditto. If you use tomato stock | paste for these batch meal preps then always get a standard jar and save those in a jar cupboard for reuse for orange jam, fig jame (also look into glace figs, etc).
Keep that up and you'll be living like a 1930's off grid veteran in no time ;-)
I've learned that they are Seville oranges which are apparently great for marmalade/marmalata, ok for juicing, but can't really be eaten raw.
I also have to say how awesome it is when I'm cooking and need a lemon so I walk outside and pick one off the tree. Harvesting and pressing olive oil for the first time in the coming fall will be interesting.
> Keep that up and you'll be living like a 1930's off grid veteran in no time ;-)
The house is old enough and lacking enough modern features that it already feels a bit like 1930s haha
Thanks for the conversation!
If you think you're spending too much on the eggs then you're not perfectly happy. I grew up with chickens and my family also grew up with them. I'm just saying, something is really wrong with the way you're doing it if you think it's not worth the money. There are ways to do it economically. What do you suppose the big farms feed the chickens to make it economical to not only grow the chickens but also package and ship the eggs profitably for all involved, cheaper than you can do it without packaging and shipping and paying middle men?
I never voiced an opinion other than "buying chickens ain't the way to save money on eggs". Do you always jump to conclusions and imagine peoples' motivations and mindset like this?, because you're making this whole thread up in your head.
They didn't say they think they are spending too much.
> There are ways to do it economically. What do you suppose the big farms feed the chickens to make it economical to not only grow the chickens but also package and ship the eggs profitably for all involved, cheaper than you can do it without packaging and shipping and paying middle men?
They feed them shit and treat them like shit. For most people [that I know] the whole point of doing this at home is to do things differently.
There is some middle ground. It costs very little to let your chickens roam in your yard or in a cheap shelter that you build yourself. You don't have to feed them premium organic bullshit that costs $5 per pound. I haven't bought any in a while but chicken feed is probably like $0.25-0.50 per pound if you buy it in 50 pound bags.
I genuinely don't understand why the focus is on egg prices. Who out there is paying more than a total of $3-$5/month more in eggs? And no, even to the absolutely poorest among us, that's not a meaningful amount.
Yes, egg prices, as a percentage are going up a lot, but as an absolute value? I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46. That isn't, by any measurement, a lot of money more than I would have paid a year ago.
At least in Los Angeles the prices for a dozen eggs are fluctuating between $3, $12, and an empty shelf.
Some restaurants are up charging for egg dishes although it's not widespread.
It's not the most back braking price fluctuations but it's one of the most obvious. I think the shortages are a lot more apparent than the prices themselves. And the fact it's fluctuating means it's on your mind even more as you wait out another sad, eggless week.
Our eggs last year varied between $1-2 dozen. Before that, they frequently dipped below $1/doz. With the price of literally all other groceries skyrocketing, our family made a conscious choice to switch away from higher proteins like beef to eating a lot of eggs because they were the cheapest source of protein readily available.
Now you can't buy a dozen of eggs in the stores around here for less than $6.
We go through a lot of eggs. That is a very big increase when you add it up throughout the year.
In December, I decided to try an egg diet where I would regularly consume a double digit number of eggs per day. This has has made the price of eggs quite noticeable. I am not eating as many these days as I did when I first had the idea.
Interestingly, when my grandparents were really short on money in the 20th century, they resorted to eating only eggs to get by. It remained a healthy diet option for poor people until recently.
Our family buys a dozen eggs a week. This is costing more like $15-20/month. At hundreds of dollars per year, that's actually money to me.
> Who out there is paying more than a total of $3-$5/month more in eggs?
You don't think a family of 4 can get through a dozen eggs in a single meal?
> I can get a dozen eggs from Walmart right now for $5.46.
This is literally your least expensive option and it's over the arbitrary $3-5 range you yourself defined.
TBH I haven't even noticed a price increase here in Brooklyn. I did notice that a lot of the "oh no eggs are running out" hysteria lined right up with some incoming winter storms, which typically drives up demand for basics like eggs, milk, and bread in the days before. Empty shelves for these items is incredibly common before snow. I don't doubt that there are places gouging, especially in Manhattan, but I just don't understand who is being impacted so much if I'm not seeing the same in one of the most HCOL and urban areas in the country
So weird how people freak out over winter storms in NYC. In the decade I've been here I don't think I've seen a single snowstorm had enough of an impact to close grocery stores.
Probably because no one wants to be on the street with a bunch of drivers that only see snow once a year just to pick up some eggs. More than a quarter of accidents happen in such conditions even though most of the population only sees snow for a short time out of the year so it’s not unwarranted.
But in NYC people don't really drive, hence why it's in particular weird that they have the same behavior as suburbanites. If you were really starving food is just a 3 minute walk away.
The price increases in Brooklyn have been huge.
And the eggs haven't been selling out before winter storms -- there haven't been any serious storms that anybody has "prepared" for, just regular snow. There's been absolutely no increase in price for milk or bread or anything else.
This is entirely because of bird flu, it's supply and demand, it's not price gouging.
I don't know why you're trying to convince yourself that the empty shelves at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are due to winter storms, or why you haven't noticed that eggs are $9 at your local bodega. Trader Joe's in Brooklyn even has signs explaining that the empty shelves are because of shortages from suppliers.
Again -- it's bird flu, pure and simple.
When I was a growing teenager I would easily eat 6-12 eggs in a day.
That's a crazy diet.
Feeding a teenager going through a growth spurt a healthy diet is no joke, and even harder when they’re athletes. Anything that gets them to eat whole foods instead of junk food to fill that gap is far from crazy. Twelve eggs is on the order of 700-800 calories anyway, it would barely get a third of the way there.
Eggs are a cheap meaty protein. Meat is healthier, but more expensive. (Unfortunately, a side effect of that diet is--if sustained beyond growth spurts--it trashes your cardiovascular system.)
Worked great for me. I was on swim team and did weight lifting and got shredded.
Are you Gaston?
People who work out a lot eat way way more than $5 in eggs per month; maybe $5 per day is more accurate (it's not only the rich who want to work out).
OP was talking about a $3-$5 per month increase, not a $3-$5 monthly total spend. This isn't the first comment in the first thread to miss that though so maybe OP could have worded it more clearly.
I work out every day, sometimes multiple times per day, and never eat eggs.
You must not cook for yourself much and have no children.
You can blow through a dozen eggs in a single day or even in one or two recipes.
>Who out there is paying more than a total of $3-$5/month more in eggs?
Seriously? I pay $12/dozen for organic pasture-raised (cheapest industrial eggs are ~$8) and eat 3-4 dozen a month.
There was a time in my life where our household of 2 was regularly going through 3 dozen eggs a week just for breakfast. Back then that would total $5 a week. Today that same amount of eggs are just under $20.
It’s not just the eggs, all grocery prices have gone up massively post covid. But eggs prices are easier to spot because they are super inflated thanks to bird flu, and are easy to understand as a necessity.
I'd keep an eye on your lipids if you are consuming 3 eggs every day for months on end. If all turns out great, perfect.
There was a medical student who ate 720 eggs in a month and his blood test numbers actually improved. The idea that consumption of large numbers of eggs is unhealthy was never true.
n=1
n=0 for those who had health problems from eating eggs exclusively. My grandparents were among those who ate eggs exclusively in the past when money was tight and they were fine too. n=1 is patently false. That said, n=1 is all that you need to falsify the idea that something is always bad for you.
Also, the remarks people make about having “too many” eggs are such that you would think eating a large quantity of eggs would be the equivalent of ingesting arsenic, which is provably false with n=1. You only need 1 counter example to prove a universally quantified statement as false.
There was a historical situation involving tomatoes where people believed that they were inherently poisonous (because of past incidents of lead poisoning due to the tomato acid interacting with the lead in pewter plates). As I heard, one man observed that horses ate raw tomatoes without problems, so he had ate a tomato raw and was not poisoned, proving that they were not poisonous contrary to popular thought.
A more recent such case occurred at CSHL involving mm294 bacteria, where one of the research scientists licked a petrie dish containing mm294 bacteria to demonstrate that they were benign. I had heard the story as an intern at their DNA LC west years later. Some people initially expected him to become ill, but the matter had been accepted as settled in favor of the strain being benign when time passed and he did not. This is presumably why their education branch where I had been an intern used that strain to teach genetics to children (as they presumably believed that the children could not harm themselves by ingesting it should they breach laboratory protocols).
That said, the advice against eggs seems to be a relic of the highly debunked food pyramid, which catered to commercial interests rather than public welfare. I did not believe the health care providers who insisted on following the food pyramid in the 90s and history has shown them to be wrong. I will not believe remarks against eggs when they are contrary to actual empirical evidence. I have history on my side on this.
This hypothesis (eggs causing high triglycerides) was disproven in randomized controlled trials. The main cause is refined carbohydrates and insulin resistance.
I wasn't implying high trigs. I don't think anyone today associates eggs with high trigs.
However eggs are high in a) Sat Fat b) Cholesterol.
Sat Fats cause increased LDL, and while dietary Cholesterol for many folks doesn't cause a rise in LDL, for some people who tend to be hyperabsorbers, it does.
So the knee-jerk comment that gets added anytime someone cautions about a high-egg diet isn't very accurate. I very politely suggested testing, and also said that if everything turns out OK then it's fine.
eggs aren't that high in saturated fat. they're less than a third of total fats.
3 eggs have nearly 5gms of saturated fat. For most people their total sat fat intake should be within 20gms everyday. And most people don't have just boiled eggs, there is plenty of butter involved.
They're easy to spot too on account of them not being subject to shrinkflation like other products can. A dozen will be a fixed unit forever I imagine.
+1. I think eggs prices are easy to spot since:
- they're sold everywhere
- they're bought by everyone
- they happen to be exceptionally high at the moment
It makes them an easy poster-child for inflation.
Egg prices are artificially inflated from the massive culling of chickens by producers due to bird flu. Nevertheless, egg prices are being pushed as a negative economic indicator for political reasons.
I don't think 'artificial' is the right word there... more like 'temporarily' or 'from supply shock', but it isn't an artificial increase
Is that artificial?
Been raising chickens for years. You certainly can get eggs "for free" by selling excess eggs. But, on top of actually protecting and caring for your hens you will also need to cull unproductive hens. Failing to replace and cull unproductive hens older than 2 years will result paying to feed freeloaders without getting anything in return. I feed my chickens everything out of the kitchen. Their run space is filled with wood chips and is my primary source of compost for the garden. Garden waste goes to the chickens. Its is beautiful cycle.
If I maintain my flock of 18 and get decent feed prices ($0.26/lb) my cost per dozen is ~$3.50 in the winter (2-6 eggs a day) and less than a dollar in the summer (8-15 eggs a day). If I free range them feed cost is even lower.
I think everybody that can should have chickens. They need about 1/4 lb of food a day. A family can maintain a small flock on kitchen waste alone.
Sadly, because the soil are too polluted by PFAS, it is adviced against to eat your own eggs (by medical authorities) where I live (larger paris aera)
https://www.iledefrance.ars.sante.fr/polluants-organiques-pe...
There are ways to remediate your backyard enough to make it safe, but only if you really want chickens. You can do most (all?) of the labor yourself but the cost of materials will probably dwarf any savings from the eggs - especially since you probably already have better quality eggs available locally than what we Americans are used to, which I think is the real impetus for most people rearing chickens here.
The first step is to dig up a decimeter or two of soil (the more the better) from the area you want to build your chicken run and dispose of it safely which your city government should be able to advise you on. Next you deposit a layer of clay, 4-5 centimeters thick, wet it and compact it so that any weeds or grass growing in the area can’t grow roots down into the contaminated soil, then cover it up with uncontaminated dirt that you truck in (that last bit is usually the expensive part). You can also use cement instead of the clay and you probably want raised borders so the roots can’t grow laterally either.
My city provides mulch for free so I used that as most of the fill, compacted it, then just put cheap dirt over it. The big cost is testing afterwards to make sure it really is PFAS free but my family is paranoid and it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.
This adds costly pollution tests to the equation, if you want to eat eggs safely. Backyard chickens doesn't sound like a great solution.
I think in practice in their randomized tests, almost all samples were above the recommended threshold, so you can save the test money and assume it's not going to be good.
A major floodplain in Michigan has a similar problem with dioxin contamination.
https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhhs/Fold...
[dead]
If you build a pen out of anything other than otherwise garbage materials and a small roll of the cheapest fence, you are going to be spending even more money.
Also whats with people buying like a dozen chickens? Do you eat an entire dozen eggs every single day? No? Then you don't need a dozen chickens. 2 chickens will often result in people giving away tons of eggs because they have too many. Maybe a few years down the line when they lay a few less eggs you can add another one or two. If you don't eat 90%+ of their eggs, you will once again be losing money.
Also unless they are free roaming over a very large area, you do not want any roosters. Roosters in a small coop and/or yard often get aggressive and they will attack you. Yes you can cow them down if you are quick enough to grab them, sometimes mid-attack, but most people aren't because they don't want to get stabbed with their spurs. Also buying sexed chicks are not a 100% guarantee you won't get a rooster, ive gotten multiple roosters out of sexed chickens and often the only right choice is to kill them because you don't want a bunch of roosters fighting either each other or attacking people.
Chickens are social animals and require a pack. A dozen seems excessive though.
> Family-sized egg operations create resiliency
This would probably create resiliency for egg supply, but given that a source of bird flu is wild birds and transfer to and from humans would increase mutations wouldn't it likely increase probability of more bird flu and more human cases?
It would likely much increase salmonella infections. Which currently appears as a far nastier problem.
How's that? I know American eggs get cleaned and bleached, but that doesn't happen in Europe yet salmonella is not a huge issue.
(cleaning eggs also removes some of its natural barriers, making it mandatory to refrigerate them to keep them edible)
Industrial eggs are tightly controlled. Homemade eggs are far more susceptible to infection. AFAIK, scrubbing eggs like in the US is generally a bad idea, and results in the need to refrigerate them.
> Homemade eggs are far more susceptible to infection
Source? I buy small-farm eggs all the time. The industrial ones need sanitisation because of the literally shit condition the birds are kept in.
This doesn’t explain the lack of salmonella from eggs in Europe
Huh ? Yes, it does. Same reason as in the US: industrial eggs are tightly controlled.
Chickens are vaccinated in Europe.
lack of bleaching force owners to keep high standard (hygiene and vaccinations)
If you wash your eggs before using them, you will never get salmonella.
But you will get rotten eggs easily.
In thirty years in Europe, I’ve had a single incidence of salmonella infection when I handled egg shells badly while doing a Carbonara (which requires raw eggs to be spread right over the plate). This really, really isn’t a problem if you follow minimal hygiene when cooking (don’t touch food after touching shells without washing your hands in between.
Interestingly(to me), for the first time in my life the local backyarders and farmers are selling eggs for less than grocery stores. Much better quality, too.
I've been considering getting a few hens for a while. The cost of setup, feed and the work involved for "free eggs" are quite a bit. However, it's more worth the cost now than it's ever been, especially considering the increased self-reliance.
There are ways to offset the feed costs by growing your own feed or tapping into waste streams like food/produce scraps.
If you get a few hens, don't do it for financial reasons. There are a lot of reasons to do it, but money isn't one. The financial breakeven will take many years to decades.
Build vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right?
Right?!
As usual when the MBAs get involved the build price magically becomes 10x what the actual cost is.
That's why you don't send your chickens to business school
hahaha, thank you, I needed a laugh :)
The MBAs know how to value the actual costs. Most people for example, ignore the cost of their own labor and the opportunity costs of the whole affair.
What’s missing from all the calculations so far is the worth of the time you put in. Maintaining chickens isn’t free on a daily you spend around half an hour, sometimes more to tend to your chickens. Even by minimum wage standards, you’re spending quite a bit more just in labor than buying a dozen eggs for $2 more than what it was 2 years ago.
First, you can't put a price on food security. When you can't get these things from the market because the shelves are bare, you will still have a source available. That's a big perk that can't be understated.
Also, the shelves have been bare with eggs for quite awhile. Locally here we largely only see the large packs being sold. Its been 6 months since I've seen a dozen pack on the shelves.
Its far more than $2, where I live a pack of eggs is competing for a pound of pork or choice beef.
Last Saturday iirc it was 23.99 for 24 eggs, and there were only two packs on the shelf (both with broken eggs).
I would agree, except it’s not food security. Eggs not necessarily a mandatory food source. Like you said, if a pack of eggs is the same as choice beef or pork, then eat that? Both are nutritionally better options than eggs.
If we really want food security, we’d each probably need at least a 10 acres of land per person in the household, grow our own vegetables and grains, raise chickens, have our own cows/pigs/goats, and more.
this article is 100% about food security
A nominal human diet requires a certain minimum amount of protein, and related essential amino acids, and vitamins.
Eggs have until very recently been a cheap source of protein as an inferior good compared others.
The problems in shortage are when the prices of all necessities are being driven up across the board to the point where you can't afford food, where government SNAP programs cannot keep up.
This is the point where it becomes food security, and yes you can go further into bootstrapping your own dependency grid given more resources. At a bare minimum it provides goods you can trade for other goods which is more food security than you had when you were completely dependent on others and the currency retaining a stable store of value.
it sucks but you can live without eggs
You can't live without food. Eggs are a food.
So you can live without eggs, but when you have no other food, you can't.
> So you can live without eggs, but when you have no other food, you can’t.
If you don’t have any other food except your backyard chickens, chances are you won’t have those backyard chickens for long.
Wow.
Relatively rural Michigan, my local grocer had a dozen pasture raised for $6 this week. Prior to that, it had been $4 or $4.50 for cage free. Plenty available.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are more on my next visit though.
Did you factor in the cameras and 10g Ethernet you ran to the coop for ‘future proofing’? Hehe. It’s ok to have hobby, and if you get eggs out of it, even better.
500/month for a dog? 500 for solar?
Do you need a consultant?
Need one? He must be one.
For starters nobody uses an electric fence for chickens. You have them for cattle because they’re so big building a fence sturdy enough they can’t just push over is expensive.
> For starters nobody uses an electric fence for chickens
Good lord man!
They're for keeping the foxes out, not the chickens in!
Are we forgetting chickens can fly? Why are we using fences
Livestock guard dogs are expensive, especially trained ones.
Nope, sure aren’t. Unless you want to buy a fully-trained dog, then sure.
If you plan to raise chickens, but also plan to buy a 5k dog, you probably aren’t mentally prepared for raising livestock.
Let's say you have 40 chickens that lay 1 egg per day. Egg prices are $5 a dozen. You tell me.
It depends. Is your name Gaston?
I am roughly the size of a barge…
Acurio??
And you aren't even factoring in a keeper/guardian, that's a full-time wage.
That's what daughters and sheepdogs are for:
Electric fence? Chickens can fly, my man...
Ummmm.... that is why you clip their wings.
(Though clipping one wing is more fun, that way they flap about in circles).
Even without clipped wings, my chickens only try flying over the electric netting/fencing when my livestock guardian dog gets a bit too "playful".
Even if you clipped their wings in such a way as they couldn't fly anymore, they're still short and covered in feathers which are probably not conductive. The electric fence wouldn't work for many reasons. If you're sure they can't fly, you also don't need it.
The electric fence is for keeping foxes out, not chickens in
You can do it a ton cheaper, depending on how pretty you want it to be. Like, you can scrounge up the materials for a coop damn near for free, and you shouldn’t need $100/m in feed if they’ve got an outdoor run with grass and you feed them kitchen scraps, unless you’ve got an absolute shitload of them.
Most folks do get upside-down on it, but it’s because they want a cute instagram-ready coop or substitute money for effort. And they aren’t willing to butcher and eat them after a couple years when they stop laying consistently.
Handle your chickens like country folk and you’ll do ok. Handle them like suburbanites, maybe not so much.
You can do it cheaper, but it's work. I kept a few chickens for years, and it takes time to clean out the coop, to move the run when they've scratched up the grass. You've gotta be there in the morning to let them out, and in the evening to close them in. The eggs you get from them are much yellower, which is nice and probably better for you, but is it worth it? After 15 years I decided "not anymore"
My Dad says "a hen always dies in debt"
Oh, I don’t want to do it because I know how much work it is and how gross and dumb the damn things are. But expensive? Only if you make it expensive.
The nice thing about sitting on my ass all day for work is during playtime its nice to get up and do something rather than couch potato myself in to non-existence.
For the HN crowd: treat them as cattle, not pets ;)
[dead]
Backyard chicken farming is a great hobby, and surprisingly tech heavy.
My Coop controller, which is hand build by grumpy bearded East Germans, even has modules to integrate into a smart home system and supports remote monitoring via cellular network.
https://jost-technik.de/PHB2.0-Klappensteller%20+%20Steuerun...
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.
I just have a door that automatically opens/closes with sunrise/sunset. My chickens have never been caught outside.
A couple of months ago, I had to replace the roof on their coop and locked the door so they couldn’t get in and get hurt (they are intensely curious whenever anyone is inside their coop). Construction ran into the evening, and the poor birds were visibly (and audibly) upset about not being able to go inside once it got dark.
They’re smarter than people give them credit.
Unless you have too many to do this, you just need to show them in the first couple of nights, and after that they pretty much help themselves.
Wild birds will bring bird flu to your backyard flock too.
It takes a lot of eggs to pay for even a $200 coop + bedding and buying the actual birds.
I don't regret it 4 years in, but don't do it for the economics.
Unless you see it as hobby and have fun doing it, you also would have to factor in your work effort.
Backyard chickens are great if you have the space, time, and patience, but they're hardly a solution to systemic issues... The real fix is a more diversified, resilient supply chain... And not just pushing food production onto individuals
Well, I agree with your premise of needing more diverse and resilient food production but I fail to see how backyard chickens (and homegrown vegetables) can't be a part of it.
I say this while I'm also - on principle - extremely wary of pushing systemic change on individuals.
I am reminded of https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/great-leap-forwar...
Should I cohabitate with and routinely handle disease vectors that I have no prior experience caring for?
Do you have children?
You almost never have to handle chickens if you build your coop right. We didn't even have a permanent coop, merely a mobile one, but chickens are really good at coming back home to roost. There are books and plenty of info on the internet on how to do it right.
Forgot that comments like these lose their meaning over text. Answer: No. Do not raise chickens because you think you're going save a few nickels eggs.
::shakes magic 8 ball::
Signs point to yes!
This is true of all animal husbandry but unless you're buying chicks from huge sellers you'll be fine.
Due to living in an HOA, our family is considering raising quail for their eggs instead of chickens. The HOA would likely still consider it a violation, but I don't see how we can get in much trouble other than having to get rid of the birds. I understand that they are nearly as productive as chickens, but don't make the noise that chickens make. The only thing stopping us is the summer heat in in a desert area. I'm not sure that 105 degree weather is humane for even birds to live outside in.
In Texas the HOA can fuck off because you have a statutory right to have up to six hens in your backyard.
That's great. Which statue is it?
Oh crap. I thought it had passed in the previous term, but apparently not.
Farm Action letter Figure 2 description:
> Biologically, it takes between 3 and 5 months to grow replacement lawyers, from their hatching to their productive stages.
Impressive growth rate for lawyers. Editors take much longer to grow unfortunately
Soon on HN: Aluminium prices are soaring. Are backyard smelters the answer?
Having grown up with chickens, they are also a great way to get rid of food scraps. Chickens especially love watermelon rinds.
So, how is it possible for the virus to get into a high-tech barn? Simple: the birds still need to breathe, which requires a ventilation system of some kind, which allows an entry point for the virus. Phillip Clauer, a professor emeritus of poultry science at Penn State, explains: “In the Midwest, they are working the fields in the fall, and you’ll see dust coming up from the fields, and the geese will land there to glean the extra corn, and they crap in the field. The dust goes aerosol, and that dust travels a long distance. We had one infected layer house in Pennsylvania, and they could tell you exactly what air vent the virus came in from. And then it spread through the whole flock.”
My backyard chickens drastically lower my grocery bill, barely require feed, and their eggs sell to friends for $6/dozen.
They also replenish their numbers when I eat them. Get chickens.
> - 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...
Please, PLEASE tell us this story!!
We had them, then they found PFAS in many backyard eggs. Now most people I know are getting rid of them (in the Netherlands). It’s a shame but I have to say it’s easier to travel and not have to arrange care for the chickens.
Backyard chickens FTW! I sold my last company iCracked (W12) and have been automating my coop for fun for the last 15 years. I have always wanted to build a company at the intersection of smart home / AI meets backyard agriculture with the end goal of building the world's largest decentralized food production system. So we started Coop with the goal of making backyard chickens approachable to anyone with a backyard. We built camera systems that do crazy cool deep computer vision and have gotten to the point where we can tell our customers, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons detected outside the coop, the automatic door is closed, all 6 of your hens are safe, and you have 5 eggs that can be collected. We've trained our model on 25m videos from customers and are pushing new models every week.
We built this for the family that has always wanted chickens, but doesnt know where to start. We also include 6 chickens with every coop, which I think is hilarious. The plan is to vertically integrate everything from the supply chain (feed, treats, supplements, vet visits, etc) and make it SUPER easy to have a backyard flock. It's been a fascinating and fun company to build - If you want to see some of the stuff we're doing on the tech side feel free to check out www.Coop.Farm - Also one of the things that we track where we think our thesis is playing out is how many people use us that haven't raised chickens before and we're at 71% of our customers are new to backyard ag. Also, we make standalone cameras for existing flocks and other animals and I have been super surprised to see the amount of people using our predator detection and remote health monitoring models for rabbits, goats, pigs, ducks, etc. Super fun company to build.
You should really preface it disclaimer your comment so that the reader knows you are pitching your startup up front.
If you did that, I think your comment would be pretty interesting. As it stands now it leaves the reader feeling deceived and misled when they realize you're doing a sales pitch rather than a friendly conversation.
Cool idea and tech! The idea of "plug and play" for chicken ownership is pretty novel. Bet my parents would love the smart cameras.
For EggsteinAI, did y'all build with CV tools like Roboflow? Or completely custom process? Would probably make for a fun read.
Long winded advertisement here. No thanks, I'll check out my hens in the morning.
Prices "soaring" like everything else? I'm sick of these articles that pick one product in isolation and ignore the fact that we're in hyperinflation and it affects products unevenly. (Egg farmers have likely been unable to mitigate bird flu because they artificially kept costs low to avoid shocking the public into abandoning eggs entirely, but now they need to overcompensate because of this random event).
Hyperinflation is defined as a monthly inflation rate exceeding 50%. In the U.S., the latest CPI numbers from January indicate a monthly rate of 0.5%.
Probably not a good idea to rely on CPI, and engineered synthetic number intended to hide inflation.
Where is the evidence that we're in hyperinflation?
How many eggs do most people even buy? Almost every story is talking about eggs and how much of a burden it is on the public, but what are we talking about here? I can buy 18 fancy Vital Farms pasture raised eggs for $12. How is such a small purchase so important in the financial press?
The whole thing is just completely silly. The focus should be on the true cost drivers like healthcare, insurance, child care, and housing.
A few years ago 18 eggs was just under $2.50. Today that same 18 eggs is $9.36. If your family goes through a lot of eggs, it can have a significant impact on your budget.
For example, a family of 4 might use a dozen eggs a day for breakfast. End of the week that could be 6 dozen eggs. When prices were cheap that’s $15, but now that would be just under $60. Quiet a tough pill to swallow for those on a budget.
I agree. I doubt eggs are a significant outlay for many people. I think it's probably because it's a stereotypical staple, like bread, milk and cheese. It's a kind of representative of food prices in general.
But yeah it doesn't make any sense to care much about it in isolation, unless you run a mousse business or something.
It was an election thing, right?
It was not really plausible for Republicans to say they are going to do something about healthcare or insurance (I mean, hopefully that isn’t controversial—it isn’t like they are lying about that, healthcare just isn’t part of their platform). It was a folksy way to complain about the economy under Biden without complaining about capitalism.
Now it is a folksy way for Democrats to complain about the economy, that doesn’t require bringing up the fact that there was some inflation under Biden. And it has some vague healthcare relevance (since bird flu might jump to humans).
The way stuff gets talked about in America now is intense focus on extremely niche stuff. Our legislative branch is not really functional anymore, so we can’t talk seriously about solving big problems. So, let’s put a on our blinders and talk about eggs. The eggs represent our whole system, it is dumb as hell.
This is a reasonable take on the nonsense. “Look at the awful burden of spending $10 more a month on eggs is doing to the average family!” … meanwhile huge landlord conglomerates are colluding on rent prices (via third party apps of course), raising rents, and gobbling up housing in the hottest growth areas.
No. The answer is to stop consuming eggs. Better for yourself, the animals and the planet.
What is nutritionally wrong with eggs?
A portion of dietary cholesterol is directly absorbed and increases your serum LDL-c. Especially an issue if you have the Lp-a mutation that increases this turnover.
Though I think it's more useful to consider what you could replace it with if you did want to do the optimization.
I've been fiber-maxing and ApoB-minimizing for years and my breakfast lately is usually a large bowl oats + mix-ins, a tofu scramble, or a tempeh dish. According to cronometer, they have similar nutrition and calorie profile of six eggs, except they have fiber and other perks.
The downside is that it took quite a bit of motivated behavioral change to end up with new dietary staples having grown up in our egg-heavy culture.
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. Although I should mention science is not unanimous regarding all of those subjects.
But science is clear about one thing: bird flu is not to take lightly.
I will dig into the meta a bit here, because both it, and one of your points is interesting.
When I read things like "animal agriculture being devastating for the world including the environment", it rings true, and makes me want to dig further, support this any way I can etc. The conflation with the (IMO hella sus) health arguments makes me question the judgment and intent of the writer, and second-guess my initial agreement.
I would find it easier to sympathize with the main purpose, if it was left to stand on its own. Trust is an important concept in human interactions.
*Reading further posts in this thread, I'm going to double down and add my own frustration: I really want to support this cause and perspective, but I hesitate because I consistently get signals that the people who promote it are arguing in bad faith.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'll consider your point. Although, just like a few other responses here it has the smell of a red herring to it, by shifting the focus from a inconvenient message to the form of that message.
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.
What is wrong about raising chickens in your own backyard and giving them a full eventful life?
You mentioned it, so I addressed it.
Personally I am just choosy about where I purchase my animal products. You can visit some farms yourself. Of course if you're of a certain disposition, you won't want to do that anyway.
“Some farms”. That’s the crux. I would not believe the "small family farm is OK" myth. If only people would be exposed to what’s really going on anywhere else in enormous & secretive animal industry - not just some cherry picked farms, it would paint a completely different picture.
Gp is not saying that every farm exactly like the small family farm. In fact they are saying the opposite. You need to look at them individually, because they are not all the same as you are suggesting, any more than the passionate open source developer making a small living on donations is the same as a giant tech Corp making billions on vacuuming up people's data and "monetizing" it.
I think the bulk of the animal industry and farming industry are despicable and cruel. I think they essentially low-grade poison our food in order to squeeze unnatural levels of production out of goods. Without a doubt, they torture animals in order to increase yield and maximize it to the space. This is grotesque and awful in my opinion.
But there are people who are trying to do it a good way. If you believe that any sort of animal husbandry is evil, then go ahead and lump all the farms in together. But if you aren't that extreme, then there is a huge difference between some of the players.
I did not say small farms are inherently kosher. Please engage in good faith or don't engage at all.
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/
You lost all credibility by linking to PETA imo
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.
It's a clickbaity title indeed. But a pretty complete picture. Not a pleasant read of course. I'm sure you can find other sources yourself that offend you less than Peta does.
PETA is full of shit, to the point where you could probably safely take on the opposite of their position on any given issue and presume to be correct, generally.
Eggs may be full of shit... but Peta? That's too easy to say. Don't kill the messenger.
No, eggs are not full of shit, PETA is. It's a hateful organization that does not give a flying fuck about animals, only about fundraising.
Vegan diets are only OK if very, very well calibrated for macro and micro nutrients.
This rhetoric is old. You can thrive on a vegan diet very easily without this careful calibration you speak of. The same could be said for common western diets with poor nutrition.
It’s true that you can’t just go plant based by just ditching the animal based components: you have to substitute them. But that’s an increasingly easy thing to do these days.
From my perspective, your point can be regarded as a myth.
But even if it wasn’t mostly a myth: I rather spend a little more effort on balanced nutrition than contributing to the immensely violent system that animal agriculture is.
I’d say I can’t do it cause I live in NYC, but theres a very famous “Chicken House” in Bedstuy that disproves that. They got a whole chicken coup in their front yard. I got know idea how they keep away stray cats and rats etc, but somehow they’ve been doing it for at least a decade.
So maybe I could
My wife and I would love to have some backyard chickens, but ironically we live in a small farm town in Iowa where backyard chickens (both hens and roosters) are banned by town ordinance. A couple years ago a 5th grade student went before our city council to ask for an exception so she could raise chickens to show at the county fair for her 4H project; the council granted the exception, but not without raising concerns about creating a slippery slope!
https://www.nwestiowa.com/news/sibley-makes-chicken-exceptio...
I recently got fined for having backyard chickens within 100 feet of a neighboring residence. That's the ordinance, and I can't meet it in a low density neighborhood.
Fuck the city. I still have chickens and will continue to have them.
I am going today to buy 6 chicks, as i was told all 4 hatcheries in my area were producing chicks for sale this week. I was told they would be $5-$12 depending on the breed.
I was concerned because of the culling last year (over 130,000,000 fowl culled in 2024, before the election, even! weird!) that it might be hard to get new chicks, but as i was told
> Chickens lay a lot of eggs
in the US farm to table is 60-90 days for eggs, that's why we wash them and refrigerate them. Yard eggs you don't wash, and only keep "cool" like room temp, until you're ready to use them then you wash them with a foodsafe sanitizer (or dawn if you're making boiled eggs) and prepare.
130 million chickens et al killed prior to november of 2024, and 90 days to the home? looks like this will let up around mardi gras.
I wonder who will take credit? because, here's the secret: It's the chickens.
Don't you also need to add to that the time it takes for chickens to get to egg-laying age? Which seems to be 4-5 months.
yes; and i did take it into account. I'm unwilling to share my methodology at this time, but the very little mainstream coverage of the cull last year was enough to piece together a timeline, and i'm sure a few people have, maybe even someone who isn't a complete nutterbutter.
In my estimation, the slaughter of chickens for disposal slowed down during the summer. Any reason why would be speculation i am unwilling to back up at this time.
Wash your hands if you handle livestock, people. and if you're around LOTS and cleaning up their poo, wear a respirator and eye protection. It's got what plants crave, but not humans!
wow, 60 to 90 days. I have a chicken and I was occasionally worried when an egg was on the table (inside is max mid 20s C), for a few weeks and thinking of putting them in the fridge. I also find they seem to cook better when in the room and not the fridge.
note: i bought six americauna female chicks for $33 with tax, 2 hours ago with no issue. Some person in front of me bought like 60 birds.
Tofu is cheap and high in protein and is great scrambled with some mushrooms and spices. You don't Need eggs!
I enjoy some well-prepared tofu - I just had some last night, actually - but for most people, it is absolutely not an adequate substitute for eggs without seriously compromising on flavor and utility (i.e. baking.)
A good tofu scramble tastes more like eggs than eggs thanks to black salt. And it's more flavorful than your normal egg+butter fry because it has an array of spices.
Recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc5pZ-PY-H8
The compromise is mainly having to introduce a new food to your diet and change your habits.
Soy has estrogen emulators. Not good for males.
> Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen
That sounds.. pretty cheap?
Here (Switzerland), 10 eggs (instead of 12), cost at least 4.20 CHF (almost 5 USD): https://www.coop.ch/de/lebensmittel/milchprodukte-eier/eier/...
These are the lowest quality eggs available.
Regular eggs are around $1 each and it's been like this for at least a decade now.
Prior to the price spikes, it was relatively easy to find a dozen eggs for around or below $2.
In what conditions are these eggs being produced?
Are these also codes 0 - 3, similar to the European ones, with different classes of the chickens living conditions?
$2 per dozen eggs is cheaper than in the poorest countries in Europe.
Honestly, terrible conditions. Factory-farmed style eggs. The “better” eggs were already at the $3-7+ price point depending on the feature set you’re looking for. Organic pasture raised eggs? Closer to the $7+. Plain brown organic eggs were closer to the $3 mark.
The egg industry in the US is a mess of marketing words that aren’t really regulated. Words like free-range, cage free, “access to the outdoors” often have little impact on the well-being of the chickens.
A friend of mine has kept chickens in his backyard for years (not for egg-cost reasons). He said he did the math recently, and given just the cost of feed (not including the up-front cost of building the coop, or ongoing costs to maintain it), eggs would have to go up to ~$11/dozen for it to break even. While I have seen eggs that high recently (at a small convenience-store type place in a relatively HCoL area), that's certainly still not common.
I recommend listening to Patara's advice on chickens. [1] She mentions some of the things discussed in this thread and more. All practical advice. Just listen in the background.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbIGEK2q_VA [video][22 mins]
I live in an urban area and have ten chickens. They are nice to have but it is a hobby and nowhere close to economical. And with bird flu I had to spend another decent chunk of money on a much larger & covered run, since we no longer let them roam our yard during the day. We bought nice Omlet coops so there are certainly ways to do it more cheaply than we did, but even so it will take most people years to break even, and chickens need at least weekly maintenance.
>And with bird flu I had to spend another decent chunk of money on a much larger & covered run, since we no longer let them roam our yard during the day.
Bird flu never stopped our ancestors from keeping chickens outside. In fact if you let them go, they would be feral animals much like stray cats and dogs. They only "need" food and sanitation, due to their feces building up if they are kept in one place.
Yes I suppose letting your chickens be wild animals is the cheapest option. I hadn't considered this. Thanks for your useful comment.
There are some problems with it that I didn't mention. They scratch up vegetation, crap a lot, nest wherever, and fall victim to other animals like dogs and certain predatory birds. They sleep in trees at night, to avoid some predators, but that isn't perfect and it has downsides. However, I've seen them stay wild for years. They can do it as long as they have enough food and water and don't get eaten lol.
The first egg from my flock cost me well over $1000. Now that was a golden egg!
Texas has a law that you're allowed to have up to 6 hens and 2 beehives in your backyard. Hens are fine because they're not roosters (though usually one hen will take on some of the role of a rooster). I'm not sure about the wisdom of keeping beehives in a suburban backyard though because when your neighbor mows their lawn nearby they can get irritated and attack -- the hives really need to be 20ft or more away from the fence.
My grandmother would tell me stories about how when she was growing up, they had backyard chickens. Unfortunately my state has laws preventing anyone from even having a hen unless you have over an acre of land.
no, bird flu can still infect your backyard flock
But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed.
This is the chief reason why Canada's egg prices have remained sane while the US has exploded. It's not like we don't have bird flu here and we haven't had culls. We just have smaller flocks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u...
Still, backyard chickens are a hobby, for if you like chickens. It will always cost more than an egg farm.
> But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed.
Presumably the risk of spread of bird flu to humans increases though, due to the increased amount of contact. And then the increased risk of mutation leading to human to human transmission.
Bit wild to me that we don't seem to be taking this very seriously other than "o no my eggs" given we just had a pandemic a few years ago.
Arguably all the awful and crazy politics around COVID-19 has led directly to the scenario of people really not willing to take new pandemics seriously.
I think the way to think about H5N1 at the current time, for the hyper individualist types who don't care about no pandemic, is that it's like ebola. You really, really don't want to get it (~50% mortality) but you have to do quite specific things to put yourself at risk. One of those things is interacting with outdoor birds on a regular basis. Even in the absence of a pandemic it's just good sense not to expose yourself to that for the sake of questionably cheaper eggs.
This is true as long as we don't end up with a mutation that can go from people to people.
I saw this morning that we now have the first cases of rats with H5N1, so... things are going great
BC grocery stores shelves are getting bare of eggs, and the pricing is significantly higher that typical.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/egg-shortages-bc-grocery-bir...
I think a lot of that is due to eggs being under government supply management. It is very difficult to get a new egg farm going, and it is very difficult to consolidate egg farms. So we have more smaller farms surviving as a result.
That's definitely a part of it.
There was some move some years ago here in Ontario to push for a small flock exemption to allow for egg & pooultry sales outside the quota system for flocks under 300 bird. And I don't mean roadside sales, but market sales. So there has been some accommodation for smaller market players.
All the quota systems in Ontario have troubles moving farms generation to generation. You pretty much have to inherit a farm as the quota costs are pretty well impossible to surmount in addition to land and equipment costs, as well as working capital for fuel, fertilizer, seed, etc. Dairy has recognized that and there is a certain portion of quota that needs to go to new producers when quota is bought and sold. I don't know if the chicken meat and egg systems do the same.
From what I understand there is no path for the small flock program to get from 300 birds to full up full time. I'm sure 300 birds/year is still hobby farm. Nobody is earning a living on that.
yeah 300 birds only makes sense as a supplement to some other farming you're doing
I'd rather not risk having a bunch of sick animals to deal with to save a couple dollars personally
Yeah, My concern is more opportunities to pass to people who may not be doing good flock hygiene too. A farm has better resources and training than a backyard flock.
Nope, can still catch the flu. Stay home.
Is there any reason I shouldn’t let my half-dozen birds get it and die or survive, see if any develop immunity and work from there?
Mostly they can spread it to you and to any other animals around and by the time you’re aware that they’re infected, they’ll be seriously ill. Or shorter; the chances x benefit of them they developing immunity are much lower than the chances x cost of them becoming ill and having the virus mutate in a much worse direction.
Ethical reasons should prevent you from intentionally infecting them.
Watching your chickens die sucks, my friend. They don't just drop dead overnight. It's often many days of watching them slowly suffer.
Then imagine spreading that misery to all the wild birds you love in your neighbourhood.
Wow, no one is talking about the smell. Have you got any idea how terrible is the smell of a chicken coop? You do know that you have to get in there to clean it, right? This ain’t no fun activity. I prefer to get fewer eggs per month than to clean it myself (sometimes every day, it also depends on the weather too).
I just let my chicken run about on the whole estate. She only goes back to the coop at dark. It hardly smells any different to the rest of the yard
I imagine this scales with size.
By comparison, if you own a dog, you have to clean that too. And pick up it's excrement every day.
With the bird flu epidemic, that probably is the worst idea I have ever heard.
Why would it be, when you consider that countries with far less condensed supply chain (e.g. Canada) have not been impacted? If we blame commercial agricultural practices for exacerbating the risk then it makes no sense to frame backyard chickens as doing the same.
My family must be odd, we probably consume about 4 dozen of raw eggs per year. What is everyone else eating that requires so many eggs? Do you cook eggs daily?
Eggs are also an ingredient in lots of things, especially baked goods.
>Do you cook eggs daily?
Yes. This is very common. Most days breakfast is sunny side eggs. Egg drop soup, ramens, and steamed egg dishes also consume a lot.
weekly shopping list is a dozen eggs and 2 roast chickens.
Yeah man, eggs are great. My wife and I cook almost all of our meals, and we go through about two dozen a month. Have one for breakfast a few times a week, cook a quiche once or twice a month, stir one or two into fried rice, use them for battering fried foods, many baked goods call for an egg or two.
Yep. 5 eggs a day between my wife and I. Then there are uses for food prep.
1 a day
Your break-even point will be years away, so no, backyard chickens aren’t the answer for high egg prices.
That said, chickens are fun animals, and mine bring me a lot of joy even though I don’t like/eat eggs (the chickens came with my house; I give the eggs away).
My mental model of backyard chickens is that the owners will behave like pet owners. A sobering thought. Granted, most pet owners behave responsibly, and most chicken owners will too.
This all reminds me this "The Mitchell and Webb Situation - Farming" sketch :)
Who is getting really rich from this?
Where can I buy call options on eggs?
You can buy egg futures on commodity exchanges.
What always amazed me about Chickens from raising them first hand is how much nutrients they produce from so little. They’re so efficient. I think this is more of a lifestyle choice because raising them is not cost effective even at these prices.
So glad I got a good rapport with the Hutterites (they are like Canadian version of Amish but this is, admittedly, an over-simplistic a definition).
Been a loyal customer. I get a good deal on their eggs, honey and pies.
I have a hen and get an egg once every few days. I had two for a while, but I have had this one for years.
I live in an urban area, but I don’t even lock her up. She just wanders about. Sometimes she goes out the front gate, and people knock on my door and ask if I’ve lost a chicken. She always seems to go back to her coop out the back to sleep and lay. Occasionally, she starts laying in some random place. When I notice there are no eggs for a week, I go hunting. When I take the eggs, she seems to go back to laying in the coop.
The biggest issue I have is if I leave the door open and don’t put a little bit of wood that she can’t jump over, she comes into the house. They poop every now and then no matter where they are, so it’s a minor issue but still annoying. She knows the cat food is in the laundry and raids it if she gets in. If I leave the front door open and she can see it from the back, she will rush around the side of the house and run in through the front door.
Kind of off topic, but instead of culling flocks infected with the flu, are there any farmers just seeing which chickens survive and then letting them breed?
I spoke with a chicken farmer last week.
The government comes in and takes over. You don’t get to decide, they kill all your chickens and cut you a check.
My guess is that that would increase the risk of a pandemic in humans.
I suspect most small/backyard flocks will be taking this approach, if only because of lack of testing.
I think if I raised chickens I’d also raise insects to feed them. Wouldn’t that make the eggs way tastier and healthier? And you’d save on feed?
Or do they tend to find lots of insects in their own?
You set them free and they’ll find the bugs. You can also give them a huge variety of food waste. This mostly only supplements their feed though
Bugs are all over your average yard.
I loved having our 6 chickens, but they do take some work to take care of.
Alternatively, we could ensure that government policy doesn't do this in the first place.
A bunch of my neighbors keep various birds (chickens, ducks, even geese!), and some sell their eggs. I haven't checked to see what they are charging these days, but I'm sure it's gone up. It used to be 5 bucks per dozen for the fancy green eggs.
The difference between Wall Street's numbers and the real daily life of citizens of the United Stats is astonishing.
Egg prices are normal in Arizona in the US. (I wonder how transient the perturbation in prices was elsewhere.)
Ok, so maybe a controversial opinion:
I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive).
The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying "already expensive eggs", because apparently other people were buying eggs $2 / dozen.
However, to be frank, I'm not sure how people expect eggs to be so cheap. Taking into account the land, the water, the feed, the labor, the transportation all to create a dozen eggs, it must cost more than $2.
Clearly paying a little more for the eggs has allowed me to support farms which are robust to large shocks like this (both in terms of input costs and in terms of health of chickens). I really hope as a society we can all move away from the unsustainable farms and improve the economics of sustainable farming so that everyone can afford locally grown, healthy eggs for centuries to come.
In the meanwhile, there will be people who have to buy fewer eggs (either because of health regulations - or because reality checks will always exist like with market shocks right now).
Hopefully, after this crisis, through graduated health regulation we can cause a controlled increase to the floor price of unsustainably grown eggs, while also (through technology and economies of scale) reducing the floor price of locally sourced, sustainably grown eggs.
Feed at a large scale operation is a lot cheaper than you’d think. The bulk of the food is soybean meal left over from oil production and distillers dried grains with solubles left over from ethanol production. The feed manufacturers make deals with those producers for their left over product for very cheap. They supplement the feed with some other stuff like oyster shells for calcium. Bone meal from meat producers, bakery meal from stale or expired bread, wheat middles from milling flour, and so on. None of them are expensive primary products but whatever the cheapest local sources are producing as waste in huge quantities. Some places will even give the stuff away because the cost of transporting is less than its worth in compost. Since the input ingredients are variable and the feed manufacturers have to plan for that, they offer the big farms steep discounts on long term contracts that fix their costs.
A chicken lays a few hundred eggs per year so they’re very economically productive and you can house hundreds or thousands of them per coop somewhere the land, water, and labor are cheap.
Although we’ve sacrificed animal welfare, sanitation, and quality to get those prices.
Until the past few years $1 was normal here, often less when they went on sale. Also, most eggs in the supermarket are locally grown. Transporting them is a PITA both due to fragility and spoilability.
The store is happy to lose a dollar on the eggs to get you to stop there, it's not just about the production.
> “Instead, dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power.”
Who would have thought that not enforcing antitrust regulation will lead to corporations so large that they can just do whatever they want with impunity because there is no meaningful competition any more?
Eat fewer eggs, watch prices drop.
Anyone with enough critical thinking should be eating on a plant-based diet.
I won’t explain all the points as they’re widely explained around the web and just a search away.
1)Ethics
2)Health
3)Environment
4)Politics
If the question is, how can increase my chances of coming into contact with a Bird Flu infected animal, yes backyard chickens are the answer
Are egg prices soaring? Where?
i didn't realize keeping backyard chickens for food security would be so controversial when i posted this
It would be interesting to know the actual economics and legalities of franchising "Farmer McEgg" setups, to rural folks who wanted a side gig. Once someone had (say) 150 chickens set up and going, what would be spread between their weekly operating expenses, and weekly gross sales? How many hours/day would that typically take?
EDIT: Please read the article, especially the Feb. 19th update note at the beginning of it. Bird flu may not be so bad as it's been portrayed. And if the costs for comparatively tiny chicken farms were low enough, then their economics don't need to look good to Wall St. They're may-be-profitable little hobby farms which help local communities, while putting pressure on the greedy Big Egg oligopoly.
Eggs are a cyclical commodity largely controlled by an oligopoly with far lower production costs than any individual could touch. This would be unlikely to succeed at scale. And as the sibling commenter notes, the reason for egg costs is avian influenza, and small producers will be unable to isolate their flocks from wild bird populations. In aggregate it might be more resilient but it would be a tough sell as a franchise.
You're missing the elephant in the room: egg prices are going up due to supply constraints due to flock culling due to the spread of bird flu.
At the scale you're talking about...you have a bird flu susceptible flock. If backyard chickens became really common - like if every second person in a street had them - then bird flu spread would run wild (you'd also vastly increase the number of poultry-human contacts providing a vector for a species jump).
this is a good point. When you have mega flocks at factory farms, you at least have the option to sterilize the farm to stop the spread. If every lot has its own flock, that won't work at all
And inspections/testing/liability.
Since the title is a question: no, no it's not. Because the primary driver is bird flu, so the odds have never been higher of you buying birds only to have to cull them the next week. Now is the worst time to get your chickens, and the best time to just go "whatever, it's not like we need eggs, we'll start buying them again when we actually have enough chickens in this country to lower prices again".
> dominant egg producers . . . have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power
Call me ignorsnt, but I'm surprised to see fewer cases of this kind of exploitative capitalism here in the EU. The only similar case that cones to mind is the gas and diesel price hike. Am I missing something or are Americans just more accepting of agressive capitalism like this? Something similar is Healthcare. Insulin for example is dirt cheap to produce but costs the buyer hundreds (iirc) of dollars.
I don't think Americans are more accepting of aggressive capitalism, they're victims of an exploitative system that has completely captured their government, media, education, and every aspect of life. Sure many of them are willing participants, or victims who aspire to join the all-powerful ruling class - but that's the result of generations of social engineering and brutal suppression of any viable alternatives.
[dead]
Guys please for the love of God. Dont eat so many eggs. We have cut down our egg consumption to 4 per week between the two of us. And I don’t think about the cost. I can afford it. I think about the supply.
Please please reduce your egg consumption. If you have people who are unhealthy and in need of nutrition, get as many eggs for them as you can. And leave it for them only. But if you are healthy, leave it for others.
Quite some people frequenting this community can't even find their own dick in their underpants. And you suggest the raising live animals besides cats? Muhahahahhahahahahahaha! Oh the comedy.
Not if your HOA strictly forbids livestock or you live in an apartment, lol.
just dont eat eggs
I read heading and thought jumped: How are they gonna test eggs for phentanyl?
"Are" soaring? Avian flu has been going on since 2022.
One of the reasons we are where we are is because many think this started last fall.
I haven't made an omelet in months and I'm still eating like a king. Why are people so obsessed with eggs? Are they a linchpin to the American diet or something?
Feed costs money. Unless you live in an area where feed is very cheap, or grow your own feed, this isn't going to be economically viable. Having said that, some people enjoy keeping chickens as pets, and in that case economic viability takes a back seat. Plus there's a certain psychological satisfaction akin to tending to your own (also not economically viable) garden, which should not be underestimated. When I had a garden my every morning started with tending to it, and that was basically the most psychologically enjoyable thing I'd done in the last 30 years, especially when there's something to harvest. Plus, when AI neo-feudalism takes over, I won't starve. :-)
"The Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on the federal workforce through mass firings, funding freezes and communication blackouts is hampering the ability of public health professionals to respond to the growing threat of avian flu.
As egg prices continue to rise and more cases are detected, state and local health officials say there is no clear plan of action from the administration."
https://thehill.com/homenews/5154415-trump-moves-hamper-bird...
Plus our new HHS secretary is an anti-vaxxer! I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
I heard Trump was voted in because people were angry about the high price of eggs (among other things) which Trump promised to fix "on day 1".
Trump cultists will find a way to excuse this and blame it on DEI/woke/immigrants/Marxists, but those who voted for him because they thought he would bring prices down are in for a rude awakening when they discover they were misled (though I can't feel sorry for them, there were so many signs).
my mother in law brings us two dozen eggs every week. I laugh at her for raising chickens and giving them names. Who's laughing now?
no.
I spent quite some time on farms and while chickens are adorable, the amount of poop you have to deal with is going to be a killer to most people. So in the spirit of HN, and if this upward trend of eggs' price continues, I have 2 business ideas:
- Uber for eggs. One household in the hood does all the chicken chores and sale eggs very locally to only some small ZIP code. Of course considering cost on a small home scale, eggs would be most likely at 15% price of shelf ones. Also bigger farmer could not just come and order thousands at such low price because the owner would not have capacity.
- diapers for chicks. If you can invent cheap diaper for chickens then 90% of chicks pollution is gone. you still have to deal with food, water, etc, BUT the major turn off will always be amount of excrement they produce.
Considering the price of eggs today, if nothing gets changed and flus will prevail, these are a billion dollar ideas :)
Edit: unless of course someone is doing that already :) I haven't checked.
As a european that until recently owned 20+ chickens I can tell you no, it is not the answer unless you really want your own chickens.
Owning your own chickens has a bunch of downsides:
- They get sick / get parasites and may require expensive medication or massive amounts of work.
- They require warmth if you live in a cold place like me, and heating costs money.
- They eat a lot and unless you buy in large quantities, it is expensive. And if you buy in large quantities, you must protect the grain from mold and mice which can be hard.
- They require a lot of maintenance since they are pretty stupid and dirty animals that poop in their own water supply, food etc.
- You will get a lot more mice on your property and possibly, in your house.
- You are worried about bird flu, so you need to cover the coop with a roof. Building a roof is expensive, I spent ~$1300 for materials. That is a lot of eggs.
That said, you can get colorful nice eggs from animals you know have a good life and are healthy. Where I am from, that is largely possible in regular stores however but in some areas of the world I assume animal care is a lot worse.
I think more people should have their own animals, but they do require time and effort, more than most people can spare I would believe. We sold all of them due to this reason. We did not profit from having them, but rather lost both time and money but it is (mostly) a fun experience at least. And our waste was heavily reduced since you can feed them your food even if that is illegal where I live if you want to sell your eggs (you can buy a carrot, put it in your bed and sleep with it a week but if you lay it on a plate where you eat your food, it becomes illegal to give them it if you intend to sell the eggs).
Lol, 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.
I couldn't find anything online about it but some old guy in a youtube video talked about them using chickens to heat houses long ago.
They build the chicken coop against the house with a very thin wall between it and the living room.
Chickens have 41-42°C body temperature. (105-107°F) With a bit of help from fermenting poop they sit very close together and heat up the coop until it gets to hot. One chicken will go outside and walk around in the snow.
The otherwise isolated living room acts like a buffer, they gradually heat it up and it helps stabilize the coop.
I've never seen this thing in action but the old man said it worked really well. I also have no idea how many chickens were used. It would require a breed that does well in cold climate. Today people put electric heaters in the chicken coop.
If it really works that well, combined with the eggs, it could make it profitable.
Sounds like Bill Mollison's chicken greenhouse idea.
Bird Flu saunters into the chat, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands via backyard chickens that have zero health oversight
Remember, the case fatality rate of Bird Flu is approximately 52%, and this is with modern medical assistance for those requiring hospitalization. Without modern medical assistance (once it collapses), that rate is a third again higher.
Backyard chickens would increase the rate of cross species infection. Cats, dogs, wild animals, all would have increased access to viral load.
And obviously humans.
Most farms in australia with animals now post biohazard warnings, and instructions on how to be on the property (mostly, don't be on the property)
I love backyard chooks, lived next door to them for a decade, had the benefit of chook-poo fertiliser for the garden. This is a terrible time to keep chickens, distributed into the community at large.
This disease is hitting seal populations hard. This disease poses risks to endangered species in captive breeding programmes. This disease will be risky for immunocompromised people, small kids, pregnant women.
We have raised a few hens at our hobby farm over the years. The eggs are nice and all, but they're actually quite fragile animals, and then you go and get attached to them and they get suddenly sick and slowly die on you in horrible ways. And veterinary care for backyard chickens is seriously problematic and difficult to get and expensive.
My wife fell seriously in love with keeping chickens and it kind of emotionally broke her. Always tried so hard to do things right, and something has always gone wrong.
I wouldn't advise it, personally, to most people.
Ducks are apparently a bit more resilient though. And duck eggs are great.
Ducks are noisy. And stinky unless you have a medium/large pond. On the plus side they are indeed resilient and can forage a good portion of their food.
Yes, raising animals requires the mindset of… raising animals. They’re not pets and life happens to them which most people are very disconnected from these days.
It requires a level of detachment not everyone can accomplish. I brought them home, thinking that's how it would be. My wife fell in love with them, and basically stole them from me. And then it's been years of tears.
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.
Feathers are incredible technology.
> Are backyard chickens the answer?
No. Trump is the answer (and DOGE!). Once we get rid of all the DEI/woke/Marxists in government, egg prices will fall. Have faith. Praise Trump!
[dead]
[flagged]
That’s why I almost thought this was satire. Didn’t people just vote for for lower grocery prices and emergency economic improvements ? Rather than doing democracy we’re now going back to farming for our own food during a bird flu pandemic ?
“Weird”.
Trumperor and Darth Musk
Old:
Let them eat cake
Newly voted in:
...stock up on luxury ice cream.
...indulge in caviar.
I am out of ideas, so is Copilot.
The answer is get the fuck over eggs.
They’re certainly the answer if the question is “how can we all get bird flu.” We all really need to be avoiding exposure to h5n1. The more chances it gets the more likely it’ll evolve to transmit human to human.
Illegal in the UK now.
No? You just fill in a form. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/register-as-a-keeper-of-less-tha...
And without the form…?
I'm guessing you actually mean "basically 'illegal' because of some regulations"?
Not true.
Jeez, it is scary how many people raise their own chickens here. Are all of these people some sort of startup exit move into the woods people?