Back in the 90’s before backyard chickens was a thing, I lived in the inner city in a neighborhood populated with lots of Puerto Ricans. Don’t know how long it was before I realized I heard roosters on the walk to the bus stop every morning. Now living in the burbs, my neighbors raise chickens, either they get tired of it after a year or their chickens get eaten by the foxes
my neighbors ate their chickens last year. i miss their eggs.
Waking up to steadily increasing rooster calls is the nicest alarm clock IMO.
Stupid roosters, start off at full volume and save some time! (/s if it wasnt clear)
It’s not the volume that increases, it’s the frequency that increases until all the roosters are awake and the sun starts to peek over the horizon.
It would be horrifying if they all caw’d at once.
BRB, need to ask Randall Munroe a "what if’ question real quick for completely unrelated reasons…
I moved into a house with roommates who had chickens. It wasn’t great. The chickens were cool, but they attract vermin. We had a real rat issue for a while, and they wouldn’t believe me that the rats were going after the chicken feed/poop, as well as the warmth of the coop. Then, they got tired of tending to the birds and rehomed them. Sure enough, the rat problem vanished.
Sounds like the chickens were just severely overfed if they had excess food available for rats to steal. If you feed them only the right amount they need, they are going to kill and eat any rat attempting to steal their food without hesitation. They are predators after all
I have chickens, but no rats because I took precautions against rats, foxes, martens and whatever else roams outside. It’s not even difficult to do this, just make sure there’s no food laying around, and plan for the coop to be vermin proof.
Stores that sell chicken supplies often sell vermin resistant metal trash cans with snug fitting lids. Just dump the feed in there.
Chickens like to eat rats and mice
Thanks chickens
Fuck roosters.
It is an utter mystery to me that after how many millennia of raising chickens that somebody hasn’t bred a mute rooster.
There are some great chicken webcams in YouTube. One of them has a way to feed the chickens popcorn remotely for $1 and it’s awesome.
My neabor had chickens. But they were used for cock fighting :(
That’s a shame, they should have stuck to cock magic instead.
Thanks chickens
Thickens.
We had chickens growing up, but we had a large farm so they just sort of roamed around. I can’t imagine trying to keep them in a back garden of a normal house.
It’s pretty low effort as long as you clip one of their wings to make sure they don’t fly away
I was thinking more about the space constraints. Chickens need quite a lot of space to be comfortable, both in terms of health but also because if they get stressed the attack each other. So they need space to spread out.
Trying to do that in suburbia seems sort of unfair to the chickens you know. The garden I have right now would need to be at least five times the size it currently is in order to meet the minimum size, and it still wouldn’t comply because it’s basically all just concrete and borders. So it has to be both big and basically all grass.
Chickens are silly and wonderful.
Ducks too
Ducks are violent rapists.
They can be silly and wonderful AND violent rapists.
Humans can’t. But ducks can.
Just like cats are cute and fluffy and also psychotic serial killers
I don’t know why people are so defensive about the fact that cats enjoy killing things for pleasure. They love seeing things in pain. They love watching them die slowly.
You shouldn’t anthropomorphize animal behavior by misinterpreting their instincts for human emotions. Feral and tame cats of all kinds will play with their food to hone hunting skills. Dogs will ravage and eviscerate other animals as play. Hamsters will eat their offspring under circumstances where it would mean the parent has a better chance to survive without them.
Cats do not “love seeing things in pain” for the same reason that dogs don’t “love” seeing a toy rabbit torn to shreds: both behaviors are rooted in their hunting instincts. True sadism (hurting or killing another being for no reason other than pleasure) has only been observed in animal groups that also possess higher-ordered cognitive and social traits, such as cetaceans and apes.
See?
Tbf, I’ve seen chickens peck a duck’s brains out
Have you seen their genitalia? They kind of have to. Besides that I’ve seen very cute and happy looking duck couples.
Afaik it evolved like that for better raping. At least that’s what our biology teacher told us, after we had to watch a video about duck mating.
There are also no real couples. Most of the time several males try to get it on with the same duck and it’s not rare that their object of desire drowns because they can’t wait their turn. Nature is fucked up.
Ducks have diverse mating habits, like humans. They don’t have to rape, but they will when there’s overcrowding, males outcompete females, and/or they live in an urban environment where females lack the strength and space to escape.
Otherwise, most ducks form seasonal pair bonds with new mates each year. Some come back to the same mate each year, which isn’t quite the same as monogamy since they don’t stick together when not fucking and rearing young. A few ducks will mate for life, and a lot of larger waterfowl, like geese and swans, are monogamous.
That must be why geese and swans are so pissy and mean compared to ducks.
The lack of rape?
Thanks for the additional insights!
I knew at least the part about swans. There was a huge pair of swans treating the small town they chose to live in as their personal garden and terrorizing people in traffic (pedestrians but people in cars as well). They were horrible but also treated like a holy cow, nobody was allowed to touch them and the official stance of the town was to let them be. So from time to time there were swan caused traffic jams and children knew to avoid them.
I haven’t even met them and I love those birds. Reminds me of Canada Gooses, the source of deep respect and utter annoyance as our avian fellow countrymen.
One of my BFFs is an environmental scientist who loves ducks, which means get loaded with duck facts that spill over onto others.
Arise, chicken. Arise.
Over here. Better reception.
It’s all fun and games until the rooster wakes you up at 4am.
Edit: sorry, I meant to reply to a different post, but I guess it still works.
ATHF reference in the wild
What kind of miserable shithole would make it against the law to own chickens?
I don’t think it’s exactly against the law. Though the local HOA might have something to say about it.
But noise complaints are noise complaints, whether or not you like the sound of chickens if they’re being too loud you’re going to get a knock on the door. Same as if you had a very annoying dog.
It’s against most city ordinances in the US
It’s illegal on my town to have chickens on anything less than 5 acres. I have an acre that backs up to woods far enough away that a couple hens would be no problem, but nope. One of my neighbors has 4.6 acres and used to have chickens but had to get rid of them when they changed the law. Its extra sad that my house is an original 1900s farm house with the original barn that used to have donkeys, chickens, goats and a few cows sitting on 20 acres, now I’ll get fined to oblivion if I so much as get 1 quail.
And then I see factory egg farms and they put 10,000 chickens in 5 acres.
They didn’t grand father him? That’s some bureaucratic bs.
USA
I used to have chickens in a city when it wasn’t legal. They got reported and we had to rehome them. They were fun, though, and having fresh eggs was always great.
Where’d they end up?
In the shredder
To shreds you say
I don’t remember specifically, but we definitely gave them to a family we knew personally, and I’m sure they weren’t slaughtered or anything.
What a delight the person who reported you must be
Oh yeah. Next door neighbor. She’s been a nightmare. She threw fits demanding we move one of our fences. She systematically sprayed our plants with Round Up every year. She once hired unqualified dumbasses to cut down one of their trees which hit our house on the way down. (They felled it from the bottom “TIMBER” style as if it wasn’t a crowded suburban residential neighborhood.)
Yeah, she was a huge pain to live right next to. And then she died and her daughter moved in. And she’s just as bad. :\ We just avoid her.
have you tried using a spray-water bottle to punish bad behavior, it works on dogs and cats maybe it’ll work on something less intelligent?
not sure if it’s legal for them to own chicken
Anon lives in a society.
My old principal used to keep chickens, it’s from her we bought ours. Met her again many years later, and while catching up I inquired if she was still keeping chickens. Since the big bird flu thing in the 201Xs (I think) she stopped keeping them, because the law changed how you’re allowed to keep them, and she felt like while it’s obviously good from an epidemiological point of view, it’d reduce their overall quality of life and that just made her really depressed.
I miss having chickens.
We had a cockerel named Papa Stroganoff, he’s one of the ones we got from my principal. The reason he was named thus, is because at one point she’d brought home leftover stroganoff from the school lunch, and when she dumped it out for the chickens to eat, he dashed up and sorted out all of the sausage pieces to one side for the hens to eat.
He was such a good rooster.
I have neighbors with chickens 2 houses down. I can attest that the chicken sounds bring unexplained joy.
It’s that involuntary contentedness noise they make that I love. I can’t even begin to describe it, but when you get a load of happy chickens loafing about somewhere warm they make a super-relaxing sound that’s like their equivalent of purring.
