The Perfect Pet For The Children (and Adults) Is Chickens
The perfect pet for adults and children is chickens. They are lots of fun to have around, clean up nasty bugs in the garden and give you lots of wonderful free range eggs to eat.
Some people assume that you can only keep chickens if you live in the countryside, but there are many people living in suburbia who delight in keeping chickens too.
The keeping of chickens can, in some places, be subject to regulations, for example about the number of chickens you may have and where your chicken house should be built. Often the keeping of roosters is prohibited.
But after you’ve found out what you can and cannot do there are no other reasons why dwellers of suburbia are unable to keep backyard chickens in suburbia.
Often I am asked what breed of chickens you should buy and how many chickens you should have.
There is a rough rule of thumb that a chicken will lay around 300 eggs in a year, laying more per week in summer than winter.
You can use this figure to decide how many chooks to keep depending on how many eggs you want.
But it’s extremely rare that you should have eggs going to waste. If you do simply ask the neighbours, they will fall all over themselves to buy your free range eggs.
However as a general rule as an answer to the question of how many chickens to have, if you have 3 or 4 hens that would be sufficient for the average family.
And then there is the question of what breed to buy and this depends on why you are keeping chickens. Are you keeping chickens for their looks or their eggs or their companionship?
Because there is no doubt there are some wonderful fancy looking chickens available. Our kids love fancy chickens and so we have some wonderful pure white silky bantams. They don’t lay large eggs so are really there for their looks.
There’s no doubt they look great.
If you want chickens for their egg laying capacity then select Isa Browns, which we have. They don’t sit on eggs very well which means they won’t hatch chicks for you, but this means they lay plenty of eggs.
Having chicks is a wonderful experience. Every time we do so our kids love it, and delight in watching the chicks grow up. There are some negatives to allowing your chickens to hatch chicks though, the main one being what to do with the chicks when they get older. Of course around 50 percent will be roosters and so you will need to find something to do with them. They make good soup, however you will need to consider the council regulations.
But those problems are minor when you consider the companionship value of keeping chickens, both for you and your children, as well as all those yummy eggs that you will get every day.
Peter has a website about chickens and chicken houses at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au
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