So.
You have gotten a chicken.
You live in the city, and you have gotten a chicken.
You have lived in either the city, or the suburbs your entire life, never been remotely connected to the things that you call food, never managed an animal that didn’t come when it was called at least part of the time, and never owned anything that really truly might eat you if you were dead and available besides a cat. And you have gotten a chicken.
Congratulations.
Step one. That chicken? It is not your friend. It might tolerate you, and a certain fondness might eventually develop, but that chicken will always remember one thing, and that is the fundamental difference between you and the chicken and the simultaneous reason that you and the chicken cannot be friends. That chicken will know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, in its own simplistic way, that the only thing standing between you and your desire to kill and eat the chicken is mere economic happenstance.
No, the chicken does not understand economies of scale, the mass production, slaughter and transportation of its fellows to grocery markets where you can purchase fluffy white meat at a fraction of the “real dollar” cost of production. Nor does the chicken understand the job market, stratification of economic spheres, nor the complex social structure that defined, before you were born, the extent to which you would have to be connected to the true consequences of the choices you make in terms of food and all else in your life. No. The chicken does not get much of that. What the chicken does get is that it is small, catchable and plump, and that you, like all predators, have forward facing eyes, sharp canine teeth and could become hungry.
The chicken needs no more information than that to understand that should circumstance shift, its tenuous relationship with you becomes secondary to its role as a source of good protein.
If you’re smart, you acquired the chicken in juvenile format (aka “baby chick”), and it is now either living under a lamp in your bathtub, or under a lamp in a cardboard box somewhere in a bath or laundry room in your house. If you were doubly smart you made sure before you acquired the juvenile chicken that it was pre-sexed.
Most “baby chicks” purchased from large retailers these days are “pre sexed.” That means that within 6 to 18 hours of full hatching the “baby chicks” were sorted in a factory by workers getting paid next to nothing, and the ones that came out “male” were summarily executed. Their frozen corpses will be sold to zoos, pet stores and other businesses or organizations that need to feed small snakes or birds of prey.
I would not share this information with any young children that you plan on continuing to shelter from the ways of the world. In buying sexed “baby chicks” you are in essence choosing from day one to shelter these children from the reality that might hit them like a brick the day that city ordinances necessitate the “disappearance” of the “pretty chicken.” Either don’t undo that choice, or buy unsexed chicks. They are cheaper and the lesson will be more poignant.
Now that you have the “baby chicks” settled into your bath it’s important to remember a few things about their first few weeks of life.
1) one or more of them may die. Baby birds are delicate little things, and it is often in these most early days of life that a genetic mishap, or sheer stupidity itself can result in “baby chicks” simply dying, drowning while they try to drink, or developing some quick infection that kills them off. It’s normal to lose one, two or a whole batch.
2) If you fail to regularly clean and replace food and water you will lose them all. Baby chicks need a lot of high calorie food to keep growing. As you are a person who lives in the city who got chickens the odds of your being an “organic foodie” are high. I am most sorry. Your chicks should eat a commercial chick starter feed for at least 8 weeks. These are babies whose mother has been murdered by your society. Please try not to kill them by feeding them in-adequately. It will not ruin the “al natural” state of the eggs that they will begin laying at the end of the year to feed them a starter now, and the industrial antibiotics that food is laced with will keep most infections your birds could easily die of at bay until their little immune systems turn into little tanks.
3) Your “baby chicks” without their mother, need temperature regulation. For the first week maintain a temperature (using a brooder lamp) at 90-95 degrees F. You can reduce the temperature by 3-5 degrees each week until you hit about 70F. Until your “baby chicks” have grown feathers some form of a heat lamp is probably a good idea.
4) Make sure that the tub or cardboard box is filled with some form of fluffy litter that is cleaned frequently. Baby chicks need something to “nest” in, old paper shavings work wonderfully. Until they have grown feathers (again) it’s important that they have material to nest down into.
Some common problems that you might encounter in young birds, or birds that had a hard transport from factory to feed store or feed store to home, or are experiencing stress because a large gang of small predators keeps “playing” with them, can be sluggishness, dietary problems, and intestinal problems. Some solutions:
If your birds are sluggish try mixing about 6 tablespoons of sugar into each gallon of water that you give the birds. If they continue to have a hard time eating you can mix this “sweet water” in with feed, and let them eat the soupy mix until the perk up. It sounds gross, but remember, these are chickens, and a) the extra calories won’t hurt them, b) the grosser the food the more they like it, and c) they are chickens.
A frequent but difficult problem can be your birds “pasting up.” This means that your “baby chicks” are experiencing some form of intestinal distress, and this is resulting in them not being able to completely expel turds. They’ll end up with a smear, or a spot covering their little anus. This can be life threatening. Don’t just grab it and pull it out. You might also pull out their little colon. If you think the idea of having to explain the elimination of a rooster will traumatize your children imagine what killing a “baby chick” by accidental disembowelment would do. Trust me, it’s not a pretty picture, and once done there is no undoing it. “Baby chicks” are too small. Sometimes it can be managed with rabbits or sheep, but only with much trouble and considerable know-how.
Instead of dealing with that, you can simply soak a cloth in warm (not hot water) and very gently clean the “baby chicks” rear end. The hot water should dissolve the turd. As the birds get older their systems should settle down and they’ll age out of this unpleasant but somewhat common stage.
Remember that the “baby chicks” are probably only going to be happy in their indoor enclosure up to the point at which they can escape. This should happen around the 4 to 6 week mark and believe you me--you should be prepared.
One last note: if your “baby chicks” come banded make sure that you remove those bands within 7 days. These birds are growing, and if you leave the bands on you are going to give yourself and any of your offspring that are involved in caring for the “baby chicks” an object lesson in limb death. This lesson, along with the lesson we’ve already discussed on disembowelment, are most likely best saved for High School biology and already-dead pig fetuses.
Part II coming soon....
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