Laura Edwards - Backyard Chicken

Copyright 2020 by Laura Edwards

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CHAPTER ONE

Why Raising Chickens

R

aising laying hens, as well as chickens, ducks, with poultry feed with the aim of eating quality meat and eggs produced directly in our courtyards is a stimulating activity that allows us to bring healthy products to our tables in the name of taste and naturalness.

Raising laying hens is easy and rewarding, however it is important to follow good breeding rules and guarantee the animals a correct diet to ensure maximum wellness and obtain an excellent result in terms of production.

You don't need to know everything to get results with your laying hen farm. A couple of laying hens will be enough for you to eat fresh eggs. Of course, you can also buy eggs at the supermarket with a specific expiration date but ... you won't have the same guarantees as you have from eggs just laid by hens! If you are afraid that raising laying hens is difficult, don't worry, it's very simple! You just need a little patience to get the hens used to laying eggs in the same place inside the chicken coop that you can build yourself or buy directly ready-made in specialized store

What Is the Difference Between Hen, Chicken and Rooster?

I t is a question that , sooner or later, many ask, but to which few can give a truly certain and precise answer, even though the hen is such an apparently familiar animal that we all believe we know well.

The difference between hen, rooster, chicken, chick, pullet, hen and capon is essentially based on two precise characteristics of the animal, age and sex, and on the basis of these that the initial question can find its certain answers.

It is clearly not an ontological and significantly existential question like the famous "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?", but it is still a very intriguing question, to which it is goodto be able to provide the right answer, both for personal culture and above all because it will be very useful when you want to buy poultry specimens.

So, let's first see what a hen is and what are itsphysical and behavioralfeatures.

Hen: Species, Nutrition, Life Expectancy

and Behavior

The hen (species: gallus gallus; subspecies: gallus gallus domesticus) is a domestic bird of oriental origin raised by man for millennia for different purposes (eggs, food, companionship, ornament, etc.).

Chickens are interesting animals, as intelligent as mammals, such as dogs, cats and even primates. They are very sociable and enjoy spending time together, scratching for food, cleaning their feathers in dust baths, perching in trees and lying in the sun.

Chickens are precocious animals. The hens communicate with the unborn chicks, which respond by chirping from inside the egg!

Chicken is an omnivorous creature which, when living freely, loves to scratch the ground in search of seeds, grasses, earthworms and insects. The hen also usually swallows small pebbles that help her "shredding stomach" to separate and process the food better. The hen cannot make long flights anymore (at most a few tens of meters) and it can even lay 300 eggs in a year, depending on the breeds and live up to about 10/12 years (the longest-lived hen, Matilda, seems to have lived sixteen years).

It is a social animal that, in a group, is placed on the basis of a very precise pecking order. Each chicken knows its place in this social scale and remembers the faces and the "degree" of over one hundred fellows, a social hierarchy that must be reconstituted when old chickensdie or new members enter the group.