Read Online Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gail Damerow
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peck order. Constantly introducing new birds that disrupt the peck order causes stress that can lead to feather pulling, vent picking, and other forms of cannibalism.
If you do introduce new birds, reduce bright lighting to make the unfamiliar birds less conspicuous.
If your chickens constantly fight, look for management reasons such as poor nutrition, insufficient floor space, or inadequate ventilation.
Never cull a bird just because it is lowest in the pecking order — as long as you have at least two birds, one will always be lowest in rank.
Cock Fighting
Quite the opposite of attempting to reduce stress by minimizing fights,
cockers
(fighting-cock owners) deliberately maximize aggression. Some poultry historians believe cockfighting played at least as large a role in the domestication of chickens as the production of eggs and delicious meat — maybe even a larger role. By the time of the Roman Empire, chickens had been bred along specialized lines, with the Romans emphasizing birds that provided a good return for farmers, while the Greeks emphasized fighting ability. To this day certain lines are bred to fight.
These so-called sporting fowl are housed year-round in barrels or small individual A-frames, where they have little protection from the elements. Only the toughest survive, making the game breeds incredibly hardy.
Some individual cocks, and some entire breeds, have a natural inclination to fight, although they generally fight only until one backs down. But that’s not always the case. I had two roosters — of a breed not known for a strong inclination to fight — that persisted in beating each other up. We constructed a separate pen to house one of the cocks with a few hens, but the two continued to batter each other through the wire partition, obviously intent on killing one another.
This behavior is more typical of the game breeds that have been around for centuries, although even among these breeds the strains bred for show have had much of the fight bred out of them. The characteristics of a fighting breed include a big-boned body with heavy muscling (for strength), long neck and legs (for reach), hard feathering (for armor), and a hardy constitution (for resilience). The cocks are fed a specialized diet and given regular exercise. The result is a lean, tough, sinewy bird.
Cocks in the fighting pit are paired by weight and have been trained not to back down but to keep fighting, sometimes to the death. To make matters worse, the cocks are fitted with razorlike spurs to augment their already formidable natural spurs.
Once considered one of America’s national sports, cocking is now considered barbaric and inhumane and is illegal in the United States and its territories. However, a Nevada corporation is promoting a bloodless variation designed to “make this ancient sport legally acceptable . . . and allow gamecock breeders to continue to legally test and perfect their breed.” Called
game cock boxing
, it involves covering the spurs with foam rubber gloves and fitting each cock with a vest that electronically records hits, so cocks can spar without causing injury.
Fowl Intelligence
The term “dumb cluck” in referring to a stupid person is an insult to chickens. For far too long chickens have been considered not too bright, a perception that has gradually changed over the past few decades. In the 1960s German physician Erich Baeumer wrote a little book — the title translates as
The Stupid Chicken? Behavior of Domestic Chickens
— in which he demonstrated that chickens are a lot brighter than most people believed at the time.
Since then, the status of chickens in general has improved to the point that some have moved from the coop to the house — and I don’t mean the hen house. Chickens have joined parrots and parakeets as house birds. I met my first house chicken in the 1970s. This hen slept at night in a basket in her owner’s bedroom, traveled in the car happily tucked in her little
If you do introduce new birds, reduce bright lighting to make the unfamiliar birds less conspicuous.
If your chickens constantly fight, look for management reasons such as poor nutrition, insufficient floor space, or inadequate ventilation.
Never cull a bird just because it is lowest in the pecking order — as long as you have at least two birds, one will always be lowest in rank.
Cock Fighting
Quite the opposite of attempting to reduce stress by minimizing fights,
cockers
(fighting-cock owners) deliberately maximize aggression. Some poultry historians believe cockfighting played at least as large a role in the domestication of chickens as the production of eggs and delicious meat — maybe even a larger role. By the time of the Roman Empire, chickens had been bred along specialized lines, with the Romans emphasizing birds that provided a good return for farmers, while the Greeks emphasized fighting ability. To this day certain lines are bred to fight.
These so-called sporting fowl are housed year-round in barrels or small individual A-frames, where they have little protection from the elements. Only the toughest survive, making the game breeds incredibly hardy.
Some individual cocks, and some entire breeds, have a natural inclination to fight, although they generally fight only until one backs down. But that’s not always the case. I had two roosters — of a breed not known for a strong inclination to fight — that persisted in beating each other up. We constructed a separate pen to house one of the cocks with a few hens, but the two continued to batter each other through the wire partition, obviously intent on killing one another.
This behavior is more typical of the game breeds that have been around for centuries, although even among these breeds the strains bred for show have had much of the fight bred out of them. The characteristics of a fighting breed include a big-boned body with heavy muscling (for strength), long neck and legs (for reach), hard feathering (for armor), and a hardy constitution (for resilience). The cocks are fed a specialized diet and given regular exercise. The result is a lean, tough, sinewy bird.
Cocks in the fighting pit are paired by weight and have been trained not to back down but to keep fighting, sometimes to the death. To make matters worse, the cocks are fitted with razorlike spurs to augment their already formidable natural spurs.
Once considered one of America’s national sports, cocking is now considered barbaric and inhumane and is illegal in the United States and its territories. However, a Nevada corporation is promoting a bloodless variation designed to “make this ancient sport legally acceptable . . . and allow gamecock breeders to continue to legally test and perfect their breed.” Called
game cock boxing
, it involves covering the spurs with foam rubber gloves and fitting each cock with a vest that electronically records hits, so cocks can spar without causing injury.
Fowl Intelligence
The term “dumb cluck” in referring to a stupid person is an insult to chickens. For far too long chickens have been considered not too bright, a perception that has gradually changed over the past few decades. In the 1960s German physician Erich Baeumer wrote a little book — the title translates as
The Stupid Chicken? Behavior of Domestic Chickens
— in which he demonstrated that chickens are a lot brighter than most people believed at the time.
Since then, the status of chickens in general has improved to the point that some have moved from the coop to the house — and I don’t mean the hen house. Chickens have joined parrots and parakeets as house birds. I met my first house chicken in the 1970s. This hen slept at night in a basket in her owner’s bedroom, traveled in the car happily tucked in her little
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