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Pets

This was him when he got home.

not allowed to jump...First thing he did was jump on the sofa (well 2nd thing, first thing was nick a toy off Nuno that he refused to put down for 4 hours)
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Here's the dickhead, attacking me at the top of Pen-y-fan earlier this year as he was upset there was no more mountain to climb, barked at me all the way up Snowden, Sacrafell and Ben nevis. Not enough of a walk apparently


Love the daft git to bits
 

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Tyrannosaurus Dan said:
Does anybody on here have chickens? My 11 year old daughter gave me a power point presentation yesterday on why we should have some so I can’t really say no :ROFLMAO:
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My daughter/granddaughter has 2, they don't take much looking after apart from picking their crap up (assuming you give them the run of the garden) as with all pets if you're going away you have to get someone to feed them and let them out/in. The novelty quite soon wears off.
You do get nice free range eggs though.
 
Incidentally, I’ve just noticed there is a photo on the first page of this thread of the same daughter at about 8 months old. Where has that time gone??!!
 
Wolf Hunting had 3 chickens for a few years. He made a coop for them and fenced it off in a corner of his garden.
They gave him lovely fresh eggs but they made quite a mess.
 
I’ve got four now and had a good few over the years. They don’t need much looking after and I do get loads of eggs which really are better than the ones you get in the shop. Really friendly things too, though they do like to batter a new one if you add it to the flock. Over the years I’ve lost a few in fox incidents that have gone to demonstrate that, guess what, foxes are crafty and chickens can be pretty stupid. Bit by bit I’ve upped my game on fox deterrent and their house is a pretty secure compound now. My variety is a slightly ‘souped-up’ sort of chicken and the damage was about £15 a bird - but they do lay like machines, and I get different colour eggs, which is nice…
 
Mel Evo said:
I’ve got four now and had a good few over the years. They don’t need much looking after and I do get loads of eggs which really are better than the ones you get in the shop. Really friendly things too, though they do like to batter a new one if you add it to the flock. Over the years I’ve lost a few in fox incidents that have gone to demonstrate that, guess what, foxes are crafty and chickens can be pretty stupid. Bit by bit I’ve upped my game on fox deterrent and their house is a pretty secure compound now. My variety is a slightly ‘souped-up’ sort of chicken and the damage was about £15 a bird - but they do lay like machines, and I get different colour eggs, which is nice…
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How messy are they shit-wise? We plan to get a coop and a small run but let them roam around the garden during the day whenever we are at home. I am hoping that most of their shit goes into that tray in their coop that slides out for easy cleaning...
 
Tyrannosaurus Dan said:
How messy are they shit-wise? We plan to get a coop and a small run but let them roam around the garden during the day whenever we are at home. I am hoping that most of their shit goes into that tray in their coop that slides out for easy cleaning...
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We had chickens a few years back. Absolutely destroyed the garden, crapped everywhere and when it got warm, oh my God, the fucking flies!

Aren't there issues around bird flu with letting them out in the garden now?

Our next door neighbours have them in one of the large Eglus https://www.omlet.co.uk/ which seems to be working well for them in a smallish garden.
 
SLA said:
We had chickens a few years back. Absolutely destroyed the garden, crapped everywhere and when it got warm, oh my God, the fucking flies!

Aren't there issues around bird flu with letting them out in the garden now?

Our next door neighbours have them in one of the large Eglus https://www.omlet.co.uk/ which seems to be working well for them in a smallish garden.
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We're looking at an Eglu Go Up for the coop. Our garden is only small (it's a new build estate) and is not in the best condition anyway so I'm not that fussed what they do to the grass but I'm not looking forward to them shitting every where!
 
Tyrannosaurus Dan said:
We're looking at an Eglu Go Up for the coop. Our garden is only small (it's a new build estate) and is not in the best condition anyway so I'm not that fussed what they do to the grass but I'm not looking forward to them shitting every where!
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The Eglus are very well designed, I think. Fox-proof as well.
 
Tyrannosaurus Dan said:
How messy are they shit-wise? We plan to get a coop and a small run but let them roam around the garden during the day whenever we are at home. I am hoping that most of their shit goes into that tray in their coop that slides out for easy cleaning...
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From my daughters experience they shit everywhere
 
sycophantia said:
From my daughters experience they shit everywhere
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Yeah, well, yes and no.
When I sorted out my garden, 1 shed basically became spare, so I spent an enjoyable few days designing where my 4 little lads were gonna go.

1st mistake, don't humanise them! (Don't expect them to follow reason or logic, they really are stupid, far worse than sheep)
I built 4 separate little boxes cause that's what my book said. So I was a bit pissed off to go in one day to find all 4 of them jammed into 1 box! So then I opened it up, binned the boxes and fixed 2 fairly thick wooden rails, (actually 2 relatively straight branches I found about 2" thick about 2 feet long, 2 on the bottom one and two on the top one, again, be aware of stupid! I had one rail above the other but the 'pecking order' thing kicked in and the two hens that went onto the bottom one, repeatedly got shat on by the two above it! That's where they slept, fuck the boxes!

I found that most of the time they'd shit at night and in the morning. I did let them out into the garden (once I'd Imprisoned the dog!)
and they'd happily mooch about all over the place, but (again) beware, they love to peck the heads off your flowers!!

They are friendly and they are VERY curious, so if you relax and are busy in the kitchen, you should expect to find one trotting about under your table, they'll easily come into your house, mine did several times and they never shat once! We stopped doing that though, it was a bit unfair on the dog!
Just make sure their feeder is always fullish and make sure they have water. Lots of water.

We got 4 straight off and they mixed in well, we got different colours so Susie could tell the difference (Ginger, Foggy, Leghorn and Frank)
It really was great telling Susie to and get some eggs for breakfast and she'd come in with 4 big fat warm eggs! They'd lay 1 a day each for about a week then they'll have a random day off.

You can get a small pen that has wheels so once a week you can rotate it to keep the wear and tear to a minimum, but I have to tell you if you have a fixed pen like mine in the corner of the garden in amongst a small fuscia and some other bushes, they will lay it to waste.
You really need to plan it out well, with an eye to the long term, within a month that lovely lawn with bushes looked like a nuclear fallout zone and all the leaves and buds on the bushes were gone below around 2 foot level. My run was about 30 feet long and the depth of a shed, so about 8 feet. CAUTION! I went to the trouble of covering it too so it was fully enclosed, if you leave it open, you'll find about 30 sparrows in your chicken shed eating all the feed!! All the hens stood outside looking in with trepidation watching their dinner vanish!

DON'T get a cock! You'll seriously piss off lots of neighbours!

Without a cock ruling the roost, the 4 chickens were relatively quiet. Hardly any noise at all.
I put some pieces of timber In the bushes about 3 and 4 feet off the floor, they like to sit in the sun high up.
If you have an open run they might (depending on the height of the sides) flutter over it and cause problems, so you can cut a part of the wings which is painless, but stops them generating lift, so they'll flutter about 3 or 4 feet but there'll be no height in it.

The other thing we found was they'd sometimes lay eggs in awkward places, they made a fucking cave under the fuscia bush and it was really difficult to get to the eggs and in the winter I was ankle deep in smelly mud. (So get some wellies) So what I did was to be a clever bastard and got a plastic serving spoon from the shop and taped it to a 6 foot long piece of timber I customised to fit so I could get in under bushes to get the carelessly laid eggs without actually going into the run! (Made a couple of hatches...

The hens lasted about 4 or 5 years and we replaced them once and again, beware! the new ones will get bullied so you might need to separate them for a couple of weeks. Once the mud gets thick and deep, you'll be off to your local farmer to get a bale of hay to spread over the whole site, it looks great when you've done that. After about 6 years we had another garden redesign and the chickens went to a woman who wanted them to run wild, so that was that. But huge silver lining was because the bushes had grown with 6 years of chicken shit, the fertilizer aspect was fantastic. You should see my fuscia bush now! It's about 8 foot tall, 8 feet across and is an absolute mass of gorgeous flowers!

So to summarise all of that. Your hens will be maintenance free. The book says that in the winter they may well lose their feathers, but none of mine ever did. Sleeping quarters will take a little housekeeping to keep it clean, changing hay once a fortnight, but the outside run, depending on how your setting it up, might take a fair bit of keeping up.

But I have to say sitting in the sun watching Susie sitting on the lawn cuddling a hen which loved having its chest stroked clucking away is a brilliant memory, They really are friendly, like being picked up and stroked, a bit like you! the more you pick them up the more they get used to it.
 
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Just to make sure that you don't cut their wings as WH suggested, you cut their wing feathers. And have to do it again when they malt and get new ones.

Any food you give them, whether it be corn or household scraps like sprout leaves or potato peelings [as they like to scrat around with this sort of stuff] attracts rats. The rats will live under any permanent chicken house or shed you build/buy.
 
T-Dan reading all the info


dd0.png



Sorry kiddo, they've ran out of chickens
 
Ooh, and make sure they don't give you cockerel by mistake (apparently quite hard to tell when they're young). That happened to our neighbours and they were almost chased out of the street with pitchforks.
 
a house towards the back of us has a cockerel. fucking annoying!

in related news our dog took out a bone we bought her into the garden one day last week. sat gnawing it, then wandered off.
a crow came down and pecked at the bone for a bit. then picked the fucker up and flew off!
 
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