I raised chickens. I went the route of using an incubator and eggs.
Here's what I can recall from my yoot:

-You can hold chickens by their legs, turn them upside down, and they will go docile until you plop them upright again. It's a great party trick and fun to do with chickens from owners who think their chickens are family.

You can also take a big bullfrog and if you flip it on it's back on to the palm of your hand, it will splay out and go docile until you flip it back over. We would catch multiple bullfrogs and see how many we could stack up before the stack of frogs fell out/off of your hand and bullfrogs went leaping everywhere.

Fun times. Oh sorry, go derailed there.....

-Weasel/minks are chicken killing machines and can fit their little evil bodies through the smallest of holes. You know you'll have a mink/weasel problem when you discover all of your chickens in your coop have no heads.

-A coat hanger with a curve bent on the end of it and a hatchet work well to harvest chickens. Secure the cent end of the coat hanger around said chickens neck, pull towards you and preferably over a log/stump, and chop off the chickens head. I recommend you not do this around your horses, as they get agitated and tend to want to kick the headless chicken around like a soccer ball.

Chickens become tough and only good for soup stock really quickly. Pretty sure you will have them as egg layers and then pets until they pass. DogFish has the poultry/harvesting side of chicketing down to a science.

Get a cat to catch/eat all of the new rats at your place, as you will now have a rat problem.

You will find a chicken or two with a wonderful personality and those will make for a good/fun pet. They will follow you around, talk to you, eat out of your hand, and they probably think you're a fellow chicken bud. Maybe 1 in 10 turn out this way. The rest are, well, just fvcking chickens.

PS. "Mentally Challenged". Brown. Wobbly. Sickly looking. Any chance this poor little chicken is a of the Skykomish Hillbilly variety? Kinda sounds familiar.

You should fish with the guy. The stuff he says on a boat/water make me blush.

Ok, not really.

I will say we have had some pretty damn funny conversations on Doc's boat.

You can also use a piece of string to tie your rat trap to something...just in case you don't get a clean kill and the rat runs off with your trap.

I still haven't found the trap that a mouse ran off with last Fall. But I murderized a dozen of his kin. Peanut butter hidden inside the trigger does the trick. Replacing old garage door threshold seals finally stopped those fvckers from getting into my garage.

I'm over here laughing my ass off at that image. Then it hit me, the Budweiser football commercial, I bet the guy that wrote that raised chickens...

Keith

Where's Barbarosa? I bet that fvcker knows how to kill chickens

I thought it was armadillos.

I'm pretty sure those no good %$3%&@!!! armadilla sumbitches are for another use.

I'm sad to report that Ma Nature did me a solid and helped that little sick chick to cross the rainbow bridge & visit the great coop in the sky. Thanks Ma Nature! Sorry about your battle steed Dan! We'll pillage you another one from the next village we raid ok!

And then there were 8...

All of remaining birds are super healthy, active and growing like weeds. I have one bird that is getting pretty big compared to the others. This big one likes to roost on top of their little water bottle feeder and survey its domain. I'm thinking it might be a rooster. We'll find out and if so.....then there will be 7.

The good news is that this possible cross dressing, tranny rooster has a new name. I'll give you 3 guesses who I named it after.

Hank

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!!!! Just not yet. Hankster needs to put on some weight first to get those Bingo Wings up to spec. Then you can gobble up my cock all you want Paker.

Oof.

These chickenheads provide more entertainment than first expected.

I was gonna say Hank too but got here too late.

Driftin', now you tell me! This all happened back in the 1960s, but I'm a bit surprised that our Vo Ag teacher didn't learn me about this way of dealing with the roos. He just taught us to leave 'em be until they were 8 to 10 weeks old and then turn them into fryer chickens. Anyway, I think I understood in those long gone days about dominant and submissive regarding livestock like cattle, but I must have been slow on the uptake when it came to poultry. But now I recollect a story from those days that you guys might enjoy. For a few years from junior high and high school I was quite the young farmer. I had 5 or 6 milk cows in those days and sold cream to Darigold down in Chehalis. I kept dairy stock and chickens, but it seemed like we had a steady stream of critters coming and going at our little stump ranch. Somehow a red rooster was living large, free of the chicken coop, and roaming around the barn or wherever he darn well pleased. He grew very large and became quite aggressive. He was a sneaky bastard as well. His favorite trick was to sneak up behind me while I was milking one of my cows and jump up on my back and start raking with his spurs. As you might imagine, the first few times this happened it startled the bejabbers out of me and occasionally resulted in some spilt milk. That pissed me off since I already wasn't making any real money in this enterprise to begin with. It happened to my younger step-brother a couple times as well.

So that was it. My step-brother and his buddy determined that the tall red rooster's days were numbered. While we were up at the barn they found this old meat cleaver from who knows where, and the sharp edge of that thing must have been as dull as the back side of my hunting knife. So the two boys commenced chasing that rooster around the barn, the corral, the barn yard, and back in the barn before finally cornering that poor bird. I was already bent over laughing and then they took that bird to the chopping block and whacked away at his neck a couple of dozen times trying to sever its head off with what had to be the dullest cleaver in the universe. I might have felt sorry if it had been any other chicken, but we were happy to see the meanest nastiest rooster I'd ever seen finally dead at last. It was a rangy and stringy old bird, and my mom couldn't do anything with it except make some chicken stock. But my step-brother and I felt extra satisfied turning that sumbitch into something useful after all the sneak attacks. And peace and tranquility returned to the milking parlor. Although now that I think about it, one of those 6 cows was a really mean Jersey bitch, but that would be another story . . . Those were the days . . .

Condolences to you and your chicklets. One of the inevitabilies of the farming life is death. Better it be a day old chick dying of "dirty butt", than you getting caught up in your tractor's PTO...amen.

There's more Facebook groups devoted to things poultry, than I'd care to count. Someone on Nextdoor suggested the following as good sources of information regarding chicken breeds, feeds, and care:

Western Washington Poultry, NW Poultry and PNW Poultry

Some of the group members have birds for sale or exchange. Others have equipment to sell or swap. Should be some helpful ideas on any of the sites.

Several of our friends raise chickens on their hobby farms; they get a lot of enjoyment, and a few eggs, from their birds. Have fun!

Salmo - I have a near identical story that I'll write up later after dark. In the meantime, the garden beckons...

Cedar - thanks for that great heads up! I'll check em' out.

I do this with my girlfriend so she knows who's fkn boss.

Except it's not my finger...

We used to call it chicken tv.

Since we're talking chickens, is it your little pecker?

My wife treats our chickens and ducks like pets, they eat well.

Due to attrition we're down to two hens and two ducks, one is a male though.

They free ranged until three were killed in a short period of time.

We get four eggs every day, its hard to eat that many, when we had more chickens it was hard to give enough away.

It gets below 0F here, I only turn the light on at night if its going to be below the mid teens. At 10F the chickens start roosting inside the coop, the rest of the time they roost outside.

The ducks like it inside all year.

As a kid we had chickens, they free ranged 100% of the time. We had to hunt everywhere for the eggs.

We had that mean rooster too, all of us were afraid of it. It was always fun to watch a friend have his first encounter with it.

Why would you insinuate size,are you feeling inadequate? I have never once given a rats ass about anything of the sort regarding any men here,assuming you are a man,hell,you very well could be a hermaphrodite. I still wouldn't care. I don't judge people on things they have no control over. More low brow insults as I have come to expect nothing less from the likes of you,and certainly nothing more.


You're so weak.