Poorly chicken

[emilymup]

Thank you so much. Will get some Flubenvet today. Chook is looking much brighter - hopefully caught it in time

[Flummery]

Glad to hear that. You do worry about them don't you?

[womble]

Thank you so much. Will get some Flubenvet today. Chook is looking much brighter - hopefully caught it in time

Glad to hear it, your OH is right of course, a £5 chicken being taken to the vet for a £50 treatment, is madness.
(understandable madness for chicken pet owners btw )

[Suechooks]

Glad to hear it, your OH is right of course, a £5 chicken being taken to the vet for a £50 treatment, is madness.
(understandable madness for chicken pet owners btw )

£5 or £50 - does it matter? We still have a duty of care to any creatures we are responsible for.

[di]

Sue,I think we all have different ideas as to why we got chickens.
I love mine to bits,often spend far more time at the lottie chatting to them and having cuddles than I do tending to the veg.
However,we predominantly got them as layers and we made the decision when we embarked on our little journey that if one did get poorly then it would be culled....No,I don't feel great about that decision and if the time arises I'll probably cry lots.There's obviously different types of poorly and I do my best to 'self medicate'...searching on the web or a quick phonecall to the vets,but we're not in a financial position to pay Vets bills.
I also feel very strongly about the lengths that some people go to to keep an animal alive...sometimes I think it's far kinder for an animal to be put out of it's suffering than it is to haul it to strange surroundings,cramped in a little box and then isolated from it's familiar surroundings and 'friends' just to make the owner feel better.

[womble]

£5 or £50 - does it matter? We still have a duty of care to any creatures we are responsible for.

Well I did say, understandable for chicken pet owners.

I don't think this is the right thread to get into a debate about the rights and wrongs of it, but mine aren't pets, yes I was upset when they were recently killed, but they are there as egg producing chickens and then we are going to eat them.

You won't see a farmer keeping an unprofitable animal and neither would I.

[Shellintons]

Womble, I feel much the same as you. When I first started with hens (some 10 or so) years ago, I loved every one and gave them all names. My other half had arranged it as a birthday suprise and got a box full of hens from a local farmer who was offloading his stock. We knew nothing at all back then lol.
2 days into my new hobby, our first egg! A double yolker! And a dead chicken to boot, it must have been too much for her Because it was such a mixed bag of large birds and bantams we had no end of trouble and when I saw one of the big ones kill my little Scarlett, I lost all sense of 'loving them' and got on to someone who recued chickens and took the big bullies and swapped them for nice hens.
Some years later and I now have far too many chickens most of which have collective names i.e. 'The girls', 'The Wellies' etc. Only a few big characters have names like Bessie the lone gold lace orp and Hector, big handsome chappy. I am now at a stage where they need to pay for their keep and would not spend huge amounts on vets but will go if I think it's worth while. I am lucky to have a great OH who will despatch when required though, so easy for me to have this way of dealing with it.
All that said, I have some Silver Birchin game birds. Had them 18 months and they only just started laying. I love them and my girls have named them all so they really are my exception to the rule. They are a great lever when it comes to selling chicks too, when the girls don't want the chicks to go to new homes I say we need to sell them for money to feed the Birchins
I think I may be a mean mum lol

[RichmondHens]

No you're not a mean mum Shellingtons. It's just being practical. My children know where their roast chicken comes from. All the yellow fluffies in the chick pens at the moment are destined to be roasters. We have a rule that all the chickens here have to earn their keep in some way, either by laying, breeding for meat or by being good broodies. Everyone else goes. That's not to say I don't get attached to them, I do, and it's hard sometimes to "retire" an old cock that has worked hard (gotta do another one of those sometime soon) but chickens do cost money so they need to give something back if we are to keep them.

[Shellintons]

Thanks Richmond, I do the same with my daughters, they were very aware that the cockerels we grew the other year were for eating. They didn't want to eat them right up until the roasted chicken came out of the oven ;p
That said they named some of them and as they heard me talking about Christmas in relation to the biggest one, he got the name Santa. So guess who ate Santa for Christmas dinner? Although I did tell a lie and said we had swapped him with a farmer who would eat him and we'd eat one of the farmers. They were ok with that but were only 2 and 4 years old, so I didn't feel too bad about it.

[di]

Thanks Richmond, I do the same with my daughters, they were very aware that the cockerels we grew the other year were for eating. They didn't want to eat them right up until the roasted chicken came out of the oven ;p

Sounds a bit like my two.
When we were deciding whether or not to hatch our own we drummed into the children that if they wanted fluffy chicks then they had to accept that some might be boys in which case we'd be eating them.(we kept telling ourselves also)
DD was fine with it but DS kept insisting that boy chickens could suddenly become girls overnight.
On Eday DD totally changed her mind and was furious at what Daddy had done...til it came out of the oven and she begged for a leg...they both really enjoyed the whole process and actually now are eyeing up the largest of our four chicks hoping it's a boy
All four of them get lots of cuddles and actually the one we're most sure is a boy has become one of the cuddliest...we shall continue enjoying him as a chick and make sure he has the bestest few months possible,but never lose sight of what will be.

[RichmondHens]

We're going to eat all our chicks this year, boys and girls, apart from one Buff Orpington girlie. The thing I find hardest is killing POL hens, but they are being bred for meat and I have enough layers so ......................

I expect one or two may be sold if anyone wants any!