What's making you happy today?

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Griff

Baby chicks arrived today, 3 casualties but I assumed losses when I made the order. Survivors are 4 Royal Palm turkeys, 5 Americana chickens and 3 Blue Old English Game Fowl (chickens).

Seriously? That's normal?

That surely isn't a good way to treat chicks then?

[Aliantha]

Most clutches of chicks have a fairly high mortality rate. I wouldn't think it'd be uncommon for a 20% death rate...on average. I know Dad's chickens certainly don't always survive, and when we had chickens the eggs didn't always hatch.

[DanaC]

It's more the sending them by mail and expecting some not to survive the journey that worries me.

Mortality in the normal course of things is one thing. A deadly journey is quite another.

[Aliantha]

Hmmm...what are you views on abortion and what's a viable foetus and what's not? That being said, it'd be interesting to know what the expected mortality rates are for eggs to hatchlings and what sort of compromise there is in the pricing to compensate postal buyers as opposed to barn door buyers.

[DanaC]

It's not really about the deaths, so much as what they've gone through on the way. It sounds like a cruel journey to send a living creature on.

[Aliantha]

Wow...that's way too left for me. lol

Do you eat eggs?

eta: A cruel journey is traveling on Virgin.

[DanaC]

yes I do. I buy them from the local farm.

I am not an animal liberationist. I eat meat. I engage in the same hypocrisy that many meat-eaters who also love animals engage in. But, I am surprised to hear that this is acceptable.

I am also against the treatment of veal calves and sending them on long and sometimes fatal journeys.

I have no objection to killing animals for meat. I do have an objection to subjecting them to pain and distress. Any of them.

But really, I was surprised by this that's all. I did not realise this was common practice.

[Griff]

Now Ali, you did not just bring abortion into the happy thread! careful careful...

Hatchlings do have a high mortality rate, but you can blame Darwin for that. Small defects that are fatal keep the flock healthy. I may have mismanaged their transition not keeping them quite warm enough but the culling of the weak improves over-all flock health. My birds have a nice life being free-range but they also are evolving to fit their environmental niche here. They are smarter around predators and more able to handle our climate than birds right out of the hatchery. Life and death are so intertwined that I can feel loss and joy over the same event.

[DanaC]

Oh I understand that chicks are fragile. And I don't for one second think you are cruel or that your chicks have anything but the best life reasonably available to a chicken :p

It was really just the idea of them arriving by post.

[Griff]

We could buy chicks at the farm store but that could be the end of heritage breeds since they tend to stick with major breeds and then the farm store has the early losses...

[Griff]

I also read them Shakespeare at night so as chicken lives go...

[DanaC]

hahahahahahaha.

Very good.

That made me laugh out loud.

[monster]

I had the same initial reaction when i learned this is the normal way to buy chicks, Dana, but it's not like they're just shoved in an envelope and squeezed through the letterbox. And because it's the norm, the mail carriers are used to handling them. They dont get fed and watered en route, but generally the journey doesn't take too long. There is a new ordinance here allowing city dwellars to keep up to four chickens, so lots of my friends have been getting chicks by mail. Not many casualties, by all accounts.

[DanaC]

ok. That seems reasonable. As does the fact that it is the only way to maintain heritage breed stock.

*smiles*

I feel reassured.


[eta] Though...I am still somewhat bemused by the abortion comment...

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by Griff

Hatchlings do have a high mortality rate, but you can blame Darwin for that.

Does he work for the US Mail now?!