this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Homestead
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This is a community for people who are working toward a sustainable personal environment. This includes crofters, homesteaders, hobby, small, and family farmers. Hunters, gatherers, cultivators, and keepers are all welcome.
There may be discussions of animal harvesting and processing. This is part of the homesteading reality. If you don't like it leave and block the community.
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The free feed. They have clean water and high quality feed at all times. None of them is suffering for food. None of the hens has breeding injuries. The roosters breed them but the hens are worse. This happens in every large laying flock I've ever seen on any farm including year after year on ours. These aren't pets. They're working bids. I'm not going to chase them around and put sweaters on them.
Oh yeah not for some feather loss, we never bothered with the jackets either really. I only mention it because we did have to euthanize a few hens due to the severity of the wounds the roosters could inflict - and those boys didn’t even have spurs! But since it’s not your roosters causing it there isn’t much concern it’s going to get to that point.
Now our roosters are fully spurred. We never have mating injuries. They are pretty good to the girls but Big Guy takes a run at my wife every now and then and needs to be reminded of him place on the pecking order. One time last year I had to despur him and carry him around upside down a couple of times. That seemed to have settled him right down.
With a flock the size of ours we don't waste a lot of time with injured birds. It it's spring or summer and we have an empty pen we will isolate them and nurse them back to health. Going into winter and in the depths of winter a serious injury is a death sentence. We just don't have the resources to try to save a single bird.