It Could Happen Here - Backyard Chickens

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

The gang get together to hear from James and Robert about poultry parenting and how to look after backyard chickens.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. God fucking damn it. I just got another fucking message about the gold ads. Leave me alone. All right. And this is It Could Happen Here. Leave me alone. All right.

And this is It Could Happen Here, Sophie. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the incredible investment vehicle that is gold. Now, look, people, if you aren't currently putting all of your money into gold, and I mean all of your money, then you're just leaving cash on the table. Gold is such a good investment vehicle that if you had bought $10,000 worth of gold 20 years ago, you would have roughly the same amount of money.

Can you beat gold? No, you can't. I've replaced most of my teeth with gold, and I have roughly the same amount of teeth, so it's a win-win. Wow, wow, incredible. Gold is perfect for a number of reasons. Look, if you're worried about instability, obviously have roughly the same amount of teeth though it's a win-win wow wow incredible yeah gold is gold is perfect for a number of reasons look if you're worried about instability obviously if society

collapses gold is the thing that you want to have because of course you'll still be able to trade what is fundamentally a useless rock for goods and services in the event that there's no civilization that that just makes complete sense. Don't stock up on ammunition. Stock up on gold. What about gold ammunition, Robert? Oh, now see, if you want to kill super vampires,

that's what you want is gold bullets. You know, there is something like, maybe it's like survival of the fittest. I'm allergic to gold. So if I touch it, it gives me a rash. So I can't survive in a world of gold. I love you. Well, if you need. So if you need to take out Shireen in the apocalypse, make sure make a gold spear or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just gift her jewelry. Look, it's a good idea. According to one of my friends who has read much more Marx than I do, Marx predicted that we would go back to the gold standard so yeah look you're it's gonna be great the immortal science wins again um connolly with carl this is actually today we are talking about um collapse but not the collapse of the economy uh because the economy is kind of always collapsing that's part of what makes it the economy instead we're talking about the fact that the market for eggs has gotten insane people are paying crazy prices for huevos these days um and there's there's

no no good reason for it obviously like it's, it's the, you know, egg production in some places was, like, impacted by the bird flu. But that is not why eggs have gotten more expensive. It's pure corporate greed. But regardless of that, people are finding themselves thinking about, like, wow, eggs are expensive as hell. Should I maybe get some chickens? And today we have several chicken owners on the podcast, myself and James Stout, and several people who don't have chickens,

but are chicken curious. So we're going to talk about having chickens. James, do you want to take it? Yeah, I do. I've been training for this my whole life. Yeah, this was your idea. Yeah, this is very much my baby. So if you guys want to sit back and learn about chickens, I be happy to your baby james or your egg well that's the thing isn't it robert one

could be the other if given enough time yeah people have talked about this i've heard yeah it's been a discussion for some time in the chicken community all right let's talk about chickens uh so i want to start out with uh like if you're thinking about getting chickens um and i have written a script for this thank you uh good yeah i'm ready to roll so the most important thing obviously when you're getting animals you're getting any animals is like that you're responsible for a living thing and you have to take care of it and you have to be kind to it and uh you have to treat it well and make sure that if you're not able to look after it like if you travel a lot for work and someone else can right um yes i think chickens are particularly useless oh they're useful uh and they're very

nice but they're not like the most practical of animals like if you if you leave them alone they will die uh if it gets too hot they will die if it gets too cold they will die um like you do have to look after them they're not like a wild animal that comes in sometimes and lays eggs. They're an extremely domesticated animal that's been domesticated for, I don't know, probably thousands of years. So it's a responsibility, I guess. I'm just going to go through some of my stuff. If you guys have any questions as we move along,

please feel free to ask them. I want to start out with the breeds of chickens, which I think are a good idea. So when you're looking at chickens, the first thing you're going to want to look at is your space of chickens which i think are a good idea and so when you're looking at chickens the first thing you're going to want to look at is your space right like how much space do i have and there are websites where you can calculate like you're working with your acreage or or how many yards you have how many chickens are appropriate james the level of prep and this dog is beautiful i'm like i'm like so happy very organized i will i

will note be be careful about getting too many. When I got the place that I got, I inherited 14 chickens. Wow. And that is a tremendous quantity of chickens. And there was especially, chickens make, you know, kind of in their prime, egg laying can make one. Sometimes some chickens will do two a day. can make one sometimes some chickens will do two a day so there were weeks where i was getting like close to 100 eggs which is far far more eggs than a human being can possibly consume that you can consume i can consume 100 eggs yeah well yeah then they will they will consume you

i will mail you eggs yeah i. I always need more eggs. Eggs are like eight. I walked into a grocery store. Okay, I'm now doing the bed. I walked into the grocery store and the eggs were 850. And I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Man, I'm going to make a fucking bank. I have like literally 60 eggs sitting in my kitchen right now.

Robert's going to sell eggs on the dark web. You're goddamn right. This is how I fucking leave this damn podcasting bullshit behind. I'm going to become the egg man. Cuckoo ca-choo, bitches! Finally, a use for cryptocurrency.

Egg coin. It's actually tied to the value of eggs. It's your only cryptocurrency. That's completely collapsed. Yeah, don't over-chicken yourself, like starting out, but also don't get too few. You do want at least three. Yeah. Or they'll be sad

or they won't get along. And if you're like a normal household, three is probably a great number of chickens. You will probably be quite happy with three to four chickens. Yeah, you'll get'll get like if you estimate like six eggs per chicken per week it's like a fair kind of estimate um yeah they'll take some time off during the year or when the seasons change they'll molt and stuff so 18 eggs like yeah you're going pretty hard in a normal household

if you've eaten that many uh so i think if you start people like to think that they should get bantams to start off with. Do we know what bantams are? Non-chicken understanders? I have a lot of chickens, but I don't know anything about the kinds of chickens. So we've had a few bantams. They're not great, to be honest.

Bantams are mostly showing birds. So it's a smaller chicken. Think of it as like a half-sized chicken, right? And if you've seen like a really fancy, and you can go ahead and google some bantams um yeah they're really little yeah they're really pretty there's two i like large chickens now look i don't engage in cockfighting i think it's immoral but i like to know theoretically if they had to my chickens could handle themselves in a fight.

Did anybody ever think Robert would be like, yeah, I'm a big chicken guy? Like, what? Sufferable. Yeah, you want big chickens. Some breeds to look for are Orpingtons, like buff Orpingtons. You can remember they're big because they're buff.

Hell yeah. Jacked ass chickens. Yeah, get a yoked Orpington. Get a hench Rhode Island red. People in America don't say hench, do they? Oh, look how cute the Bantam is. That's amazing. Oh yeah, we used to have a couple of those.

So beautiful. So one of the things about Bantams is you can't get them point of lay. So point of lay is when they've been sexed right so you know that they're girls and they they come to you

just when they're about to lay right and you don't generally you get bantams younger and you don't get them sexed so in our case

we had one she crowed a lot so we thought she's a rooster she wasn't and the other one was a rooster so that's going to be my question do you thought she's a rooster she wasn't and the other one was a rooster so that's going to be my question

do you need to get a rooster also? no, so the chickens are going to lay regardless I don't understand how that works so the chickens are going to lay regardless right? why? how? they just do the eggs aren't fertilized right?

yeah, so they won't make chickens they won't make chickens? They won't be baby chickens. Oh, it's like if I get it. Okay, I get it. I get it. Yeah. That's a person, like a human doing it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's kind of like their equivalent of menstruation effectively. Yeah, I understand. I know that now. Everything's coming back to me as far as like vegan talking points go. Chickens, by the way way because chickens are as james said these these are animals and you have to take good care of them that is your responsibility you do low-key realize the longer you have them but they're monsters like oh yeah their favorite

food is their own kind they have a section about this each other they're cannibals yeah they're tiny fucking dinosaurs yeah so like don't go outside with your chickens like the other day I was cutting down some bushes and I had my shorts I had a little cut from the from the thorn and when they see blood they are just like fucking

exocet missiles does that affect the egg yeah I mean what you feed them. So yeah, we butchered a deer last year and we wound up with a lot of like deer fat and kind of like meat that you gave it to the chickens.

Well, yeah, we had some stuff because the deer had been hit by a car. There was some meat we couldn't eat. So I wound up giving several pounds of meat to the chickens and those eggs fucking ruled. Wow. Okay. It's not advised to feed them deer.

But yeah, so you want to stuff actually if you, so they do bleed, there's a stuff called purple spray. I'm sure it's not what it's actually called, but it's purple and it's a spray. And you can, we already called it purple spray. You can spray it on them and it just stops it looking like blood. I'm sure it's like an antibiotic.

Or maybe antiseptic. But yeah, you could spray that on them and it just stops it looking like blood it's i'm sure it's like an antibiotic um or maybe a antiseptic but um yeah you could spray that on the chicken so like one of mine she's just got this little thing on her wing that opens up every now and again and i just make sure i spray that um and that stops her from the other ones from pecking her right yeah so yeah they have to be tiny dinosaurs we had a last year some kind of animal. I think it was probably like a possum or something. I don't really know. Some kind of animal got into the coop and attacked my chickens. And I had one chicken. We called it the anarchist chicken because it could always escape. It never was in the cage.

And when they got attacked, the anarchist chicken leapt to defend the rest of the flock and fought off whatever it was that attacked, but she wound up with a hole in her side. And so I like took her and I dressed the wound and I put her back in the cage and they all immediately tried to eat her. You want to have a separation cage. Yeah.

Yeah. I, that was the lesson that I learned. I had to take her out. Cause yeah. We have a tiny rabbit hutch that we use. It's called the Merrill Peep Memorial Chicken Hospital because Merrill Peep is one of our chickens who died.

And you just put them in that for a few days until they're better and then they can reintegrate just fine. So, we've made very little progress on my script. Okay, so you want to get Buff Orpington's, Rhode Island Red's are good, Plymouth Rock's, Americana's are nice.

Have you guys seen those? No. I don't know anything about what you're talking about. Everything you're saying sounds like a different language. What do they teach you in school? So they're called Easter Eggers sometimes. They lay different color eggs, like pastel color eggs, like blue and green eggs.

No. Have you not been exposed to this at all no i mean i grew up next to cornfield but also i i i guess i guess i was around a farm but we didn't interact with the chickens because you don't i don't know they were like here deal with cows instead that was like yeah chickens are good don't go dive straight into catholic you're you know getting into animal husbandry uh but yeah americana is fun say ladies colored eggs uh one of my friend's dad's had them when i was a kid and he made bank selling them around easter so yeah if you're looking to get into a chicken hustle and then uh leghorns are like really good they're like hardy chickens but they are loud so if you

live near people um i would consider not you You should also check your local laws. Like where I live, you can't have a rooster. You can have up to five chickens within city limits. You can't have a rooster. You don't really want a rooster unless you're allowed to have chicks. No, and one of the things roosters can do is like peck at your chickens and effectively like wear holes in their, like, yeah, they wind up like bald in parts. Yeah, they're little sons of bitches

we harvested ours as soon as I got the place and harvested yeah that's the term this leads into a question that I've been wanting to ask which is that okay it is my firm belief that I could defeat a chicken in single combat

it would send me to the hospital but apparently this is the thing you need to do with your chickens so how practical is it to defeat a chicken in single combat, it would send me to the hospital. But apparently this is a thing you need to do with your chickens. So how practical is it to defeat a chicken in single combat if you have to extract another chicken or something? I've never actually had any kind of aggression from my chickens. When I'm bleeding, they'll peck my leg. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How is that not aggression? For a while, we hadn't realized that a thing that you want when you get chickens is a rodent-proof feeder, right? So you don't want to just put the food in a bowl. If you have an issue with rodents, you want to have the thing. So like basically she comes up,

she stands on a step and that opens up the feeder and she can peck and eat, right? And you want to get a rodent-proof feeder. You can just buy them a tractor supply. But ours gummed up with rain and we didn't realize. And the chickens were obviously not getting food they were upset with this so they would attack me every time i came outside like they'd attack me and i'd be like go away so i'd give them treats right i'd

give them like worms and apples a kitten has arrived uh oh i have to she was wanting to hold or to be held so i'm holding my cat for anyone that's like, what's happening? She just wanted to be snuggled. That's okay. Oh, she's giving you a kiss? Yeah, so the mine would attack me for a while, and I just gave them mealworms when they would attack me, so unconsciously I was reinforcing the attacking behavior. So they would attack me for a while. But I think you could take them.

Just keep swinging. But yeah, you don't have to. They're very, like most of the time, at least mine, I hand feed them. So like a nice treat for them is I'll cut a melon in half. And I'll chase Shireen because she's allergic to melons. I am. That I am. And then you just hold it out and they'll come and eat it

and they love scraps like that's often like what I do with basically all of my food waste is give it to the chickens and they tend to be very happy with that yeah it's very sustainable let's get on to space because I want to talk about

before we get into this speaking speaking of sustainability, do you know who else is incredibly sustainable? Oh, wow. I don't think we can say that. Capitalism? Yes, inherently so.

Shiny stuff. It will last a thousand years. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters

with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that

actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now

and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. All right, we're back yep buy some gold buy some gold want to reinforce that because gold when you're starving will be more useful than chickens because it's shiny that's right that's right it'll it'll make you forget that you're slowly starving to death it's the foundation of all of this shit it's shiny. Okay. Yeah, so talking of shiny things, I want to talk about chicken coops because there's

a shiny thing section we'll get. I love a good coop. I do love a good, I love to make a coop. I love to buy a coop. I love to help my friends buy coops.

It's a great conversation area. Anyway, so they do need a coop. They need a place where they can go at night and you want it to be shut off from predators, so you don't want like your possum um your raccoon and your fox your stoat your weasel ferret whatever whatever you're dealing with snake um so

once you get above three chickens you might have more than one nesting box in there um but like this doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go out and buy, you can buy them on Amazon now, but they're quite expensive and they're often quite shit, like the pre-made chicken coops, they're very poor quality. If you have a shed or a kennel or something like that, you can pretty easily make it into a coop. You can just put a drop-down door on the front so you can close them in at night and let them out in the morning.

I've seen people use drawers drawers you know like like dresses just open those and use them as nesting boxes and you you want to put down some straw in your nesting box and yeah i have i have i think four for the the the chickens that i have now which is about i think we've got about 11 um and they're they are two of them are large enough for two at a time and then two of them are smaller enough for two at a time and then two of them are smaller although chickens will and and sometimes one of the things you have to do occasionally is come in and like take them out of the some of them out of the nesting boxes some of them get like stuck in a loop where they get broody yeah yeah yeah and and so you just i just

like take them out and set them down where there's like some stuff to peck at and they seem to it kind of resets their little chicken brains silky bantams which are one of the like show bantams get broody as fuck and it's like i've had friends who have had them and they will they will not eat and not drink because they're just like no i'm sitting on this egg like you can't stop me uh and you have to like lock them out of there there's not even an egg there chicken what's wrong with you yeah well they'll take another chicken's egg yeah yeah just yeah or even like uh silky um that's yeah it's cute look them up they're they're real they're floofers they're very cute um so you want to build them a run too right a place where they can safely run around have their food have

their water and i would suggest uh using construction netting when you build a run, by the people called chicken wire, which is like maybe one inch size holes. But like a lot of stuff can get through that. You'd be amazed like rats, mice, snakes can all get through that. And if you use construction netting, which is like maybe, I'm not very good at inches, but like about one centimeter size, a lot less is going to get through it. And you might want to bury it down to like a foot or two below the run if you're building something permanent just because things can't dig

underneath right like we had a fox dig underneath uh when i when i was a kid and don't it's preferable to do that to putting on the floor of your run because they don't like the little wire on the little feet and yeah no no definitely not on, you want them to have access to dirt and ideally sometimes grass too. One thing that they, cause I, I will let them out sometimes during the day and I have a barn that has like a, like it's kind of dust in there. Like not dust, um, almost like, almost like sandy dry dirt. And one of their favorite things, especially during the summer is to just kind of like sit down and rub yeah that dirt all up in the like and they they kind of need to be able to do some version of that in order to be like healthy otherwise they yeah it's it's good for them it's good for their

skin it's good for them existing yeah it's good for their mental health i think they're like people keep kicking their terrible conditions commercially but it doesn't mean you have an excuse to so oh when i when i got these chickens they had been the people who'd had them before i don't know what the fuck was wrong with them they had a sizable outside run but whoever the folks who had them had covered the entire bottom in stone so they were just like living on stone no they were in horrible shape and when we harvested the rooster his gizzard was full of automotive glass

what? yeah it was fucked up it was I spent cause they all had huge patches of them that like were bald oh my god I mean we dealt with that partially by getting rid of the rooster and partially by making sure we gave them. I still do mix in oyster shell bits with the calcium is good for them.

Yeah. So you'll know if they need that. Like they start coming and it's actually really dangerous. Like an egg can rupture inside if they're laying it and that can be fatal. So you want to make sure... We can cover food quickly, I guess. So they do like to grub for worms and stuff like that, right? Look for insects, and they love to have scraps. But for a laying chicken,

you want to make sure it's getting a decent base diet of layers pellets, which should be somewhere between 60% and 80% protein. Wait, sorry, what kind of pellets? Layer pellets. Yeah. There's a number of brands of it, but yeah, they'reets layer pellets yeah there's a number of brands of it but yeah they're called layer pellets yeah some of them will already have oyster shell and grit and like robert said they do need those if not you can augment them but um it's probably just gonna be

easier just get one sack uh and just dump it all in um they do need access to water as well uh that they can get out all day uh i think it's better to use like a nipple type drinker which is a um you can take a bucket any bucket right fill it up and then you put these little nipples and they just they're red and again they like to peck at red stuff so they'll peck at them and then they get when that stops like you know they can't put their feet in the water and get their shit from their feet in the water and get sick like they're not clean animals so uh just if you do that and then i like to put a little bit it's hot where i live in san diego so i put a little bit of electrolyte stuff in there for them and they don't seem to mind and it just seems to help um and then yeah like it's good to uh you can feed them kitchen straps but you don't want to overload

them especially on carby stuff like they do need enough protein um to keep up their laying and they definitely need enough calcium um one thing i will say if you're if you're gonna buy something if you're gonna buy a chicken coop uh there's a company called eggloo um which is like igloo but egg uh they make some really nice prefab coops that are pretty good um and you can buy an attachment which puts a little door on it that uh it a solar panel, I guess, to charge itself. And then it will open at daylight and close at sunset. And so if you're the sort of person who knows that you'll forget to bring your chickens in, obviously they're at risk at night

from predation and things. And they become completely fucking useless at night. When they go to sleep, you can pick them up and turn them upside down and stuff. They're just like. Yeah. My interior, the interior of my coop has,

it's really cute. It's basically like a ladder, like a very wide ladder going up the side of the building. And they just all stand on like, it's like a group of 20, like at different levels of the ladder. And they just sit there as they sleep at night. Yeah yeah they need a pair to sleep on actually that's a good yeah reminder um you can't you can't just on the floor yeah they don't like just being in the dirt

no and then like something to entertain them so a good thing to entertain them is uh like an old if you have cds still uh young listeners may not remember having cd collections but uh if you do have cds or you know you can find cds um you can just hang those and then they'll peck at them and stuff because they're kind of shiny and they move around so it's a good thing to do with your alanis morissette cds they also really like i mean one of the things that so i just tore out my what was left of my front lawn in order to grow more stuff. And I just tossed all of the chunks of like soil and grass in there. They love pecking at that shit. It's like one of their favorite things in the world.

Yeah, we put them on. I have some planters out back and they're like fenced off. The chickens can't get in. And then when we turn them over, when we like replant them, we'll put them in there and they just go ham. They find these huge worms. So I have no idea how they got in there no um but yeah they love that stuff yeah and i let them out into the yard periodically and it's always whenever i have to like walk them back in because you kind of just like loop around them to like guide the flock as they move because

they'll kind of instinctively go away from you if you're walking towards them one of my hobbies is to like pretend to be an old I feel like we should stop this immediately buy some gold welcome I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Okay. Sometimes I pretend it's the one with the green guy on it. Okay. Sometimes I pretend it's the Shawshank Redemption, which is why I'm giving my chickens a boat by the coast for when they escape. Robert's going to go show us why he cut the hole in his bed sheet. All of us love having health insurance. Please stop.

It's true. Can I ask a question about space so like how how much physical room do they need like how much line do you have to have so you can look up there are pretty good like uh calculators online where you can look up how many square yards or whatever you have but i'm terrible at estimating size but you know my i don't have very big garden you know we've we've had up to six uh chickens but you do want to just look it up and and it's not like the the square yardage you have isn't as important as the access they have to stuff right yeah can they get sunlight can they be like out in in

the dirt like something that feels like you know where a chicken would want to be this is this is this is like not something you could burn from in an apartment right like something that feels like, you know, where a chicken would want to be. This is like not something you could burn from in an apartment, right? No. No, no. They need to be outside. Yeah. If you live in an apartment that like has a yard or something that's shared,

you potentially could, but no, you do need like some amount of dirt and grass essentially. If you maybe have like a community garden, you could talk to people about doing it there. um so mine just go all around my yard all day and like uh you guys have noticed also come into my office um and then they'll put themselves to bed at night they know where their home is so they'll just go back to bed at night um i want to talk a little bit about health because there are definitely some chicken health things and and it's very expensive to take chickens to the vet actually because you have to go to an exotic and avian vet

and they're quite rare. A what vet? Exotic and avian vet. Okay. Yeah. You could take them to a regular vet, but most of the time... So actually, if your chickens get sick, in most states, there's a state-run helpline you can call

and it's free and they'll put you onto a vet right away yeah and they're very very helpful um and then that's because of the danger of different avian flus like infecting large numbers of of animals yeah does something similar to pet insurance exist for farm peep farm animals or not really it does but i don't think on it you probably wouldn't want to be investing it out for your chickens like if you're breeding livestock right and that's the thing you can have um and you know one of the things you do have to keep in mind is that at some point you will have to kill them um you know because they will get old enough or sick enough and some form of euthanasia will wind up being kinder than

continuing to like let them be um like that's just that's true of any kind of livestock right at some point you have to if you don't just want to let it die naturally which again in a lot of cases will be prolonging its suffering you you do have to be willing to take care of that one way or the other yeah like you can give them the best life you can give them and look after them for as long as you can, but oftentimes, yeah, they will. Or they'll get hurt, right? Yes, they'll get injured.

Species gets in there or whatever. Well, I think that's a good reality to remind people of, that it's actually like a serious thing to have a chicken and then be responsible for its life and death and also like the egg comes out of their butthole, right? So it's covered in poop. Yes, well, it's their cloaca well i'm just saying it's not just like cartoon chicken like you know what i mean like i think

yeah yeah it's not ago um but it's not that game everyone played in covid where you're on an island and you build stuff um yeah i just think people usually are really flippant with stuff like like yeah it's a living animal and like you have to take care of it and it's your responsibility right let's say like you need to think about that oh you don't want to let their bumholes get too poopy we're talking about health so they can get worms that way and that's really bad so if you see that you just just pick them up and they'll be and that's this is why you want to handle them when they're young so that you can handle them with stuff like this so like i'll just pick them up and use a spray bottle or a little hose with a bit of warm water and and they don't mind that at all and at least they they don't give

me any shit um but you want to look up some of the common things you're going to see are like gape worm um it's called gape worm because they'll gape you'll see them gaping uh they can be egg bound uh and then depending on where you are are They can be too hot or too cold So you do need to make sure they have shade I found this thing Someone was moving out It's like a mister That they have at restaurants

When you go to a restaurant in LA and it's hot They have an annoying wetness Wait what? That's a thing? Have you ever been to an amusement park In a line? They sometimes have them too if it's really hot. Or sometimes in the fruit and vegetables.

Yeah, I've seen it there, but that's the only... Huh. They have those in restaurants? Yeah, they have them at restaurants. Not inside. Outside. Yeah. There's misters to make it so they're not as hot.

If you're in like Phoenix or somewhere Yeah So I got one of those You can find a lot of this shit by the way If you live in a place that is gentrifying Like unfortunately it's happened In the part of San Diego I live in Like for instance all the wood for my chicken

Won't pay for that shit There's rich people doing stuff to houses It doesn't need to be done Just like obtain wood from their building sites. Yeah. Obtain. Look, it's like those pallets of bricks. If they didn't want you to use them,

they wouldn't leave it out there. Yeah. And why would Elizabeth Warren have sent the pallets of bricks if she didn't want you to use them? So, yeah, obviously like health-wise, like I said, you want to make sure you have that purple spray on hand. You want to be giving them some electrolytes in their water. You want to make sure they have shade if it's hot

and that their coop is warm. Like, they don't like it much below freezing. No. Like, 32. Yeah, I keep, like, a heat lamp, basically, all winter in there. Yeah. With a red bulb so it doesn't, like, upset their sleep patterns. Yeah. So people, the way battery people do it, like, battery chickens, winter in there with a red bulb so it doesn't like upset their their sleep patterns yeah so people

the way battery people do it like battery chickens is they they they do more day night cycles using artificial light to to make the chickens lay more if you see what i mean and the chickens will lay at an accelerated rate yeah it'll keep them laying during the winter at a lower rate be doing that that's not particularly good for the birds. I let them rest this winter. Yeah, let them, you know, they're animals. They don't just exist to provide you food. Like, okay, a question on this. Like, how cold, is there like a point it gets in the winter

where it's like you probably shouldn't have them? You just want to keep the coop warm. And then, like, so like when we were at Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, right, they have chickens. I don't know how cold it was, but I went to bed every night with a Nalgene full of boiling water. And when I woke up, I was hugging an ice baby. Like, it was so cold.

Yeah, the heater where I was staying didn't work the first time. So, like like it was cold af and the chickens had a nice warm coop with a heat lamp and they were fine yeah you can i mean people keep chickens in every imaginable climate so you you as long as you're careful about making sure you know that you have a warm place for them to sleep they will be okay yeah and you can i miss can you like let them out in the snow and stuff or should you yeah yeah they love snow no yeah they have fun with that there's it snowed yesterday and my chickens are having a great time out oh yeah yeah they like it actually like they'll run like i remember at home my chickens love the snow um yeah and talk to when you're buying the chickens

right like consider that in your breed choice like some yeah they're gonna do yeah and they're gonna do some of them are gonna not like the heat and honestly like one of the better things you can do in that situation if you're like if i live in some weird ass part of the world where it's freezing half the time just google like keeping backyard chickens whatever the name of your area is and then reddit and yeah you will find people talking on reddit yeah yeah i've gotten this is the this is the breed that i picked and this is what i do and you know people love to talk about the chicken so yeah the backyard chickens ready it was one of my resources yeah exactly it's a good place to look and yeah so if you have a coop you're going to want to clean it right you can use that chicken

poop as fertilizer oh it's some of the best in the world yeah so then if you're if you're into this sort of you know like growing your own food, then this all works well, right? You give the chicken to scraps, chickens make you eggs, they poop. You put that into your plants, you have nice plants. You want to balance it out. It's a bit acidic.

I think you're just using the shit. So you want to be combusting with other stuff as well, right? Yeah. Checking your soil chemistry before you sort of go ham. But yeah, so you can do that. You do want to make sure yeah i've got a poultry helpline we spoke about that california's is great though like don't hesitate to call the poultry helpline um if you need help like there's there's people who are

being paid to help you and like that is normally like i know like most pet owners unless they're very wealthy will have had to make horrible decisions about their pet's health versus their own income when when they've like you know and it's it's shit uh so that helpline is free and like robert said it's because they're very scared of infectious diseases so take advantage of like your you know taxpayer funded chicken vet and yeah give them a call um i think i don't know if it's in every state but i know it's a in a lot of them. Wait, yeah, go ahead. Oh, are you going to talk about giving them like the shake and bake treatment for, what do you call it? If they get mites.

Oh yeah, yeah, go ahead and talk about it. So, you know, chickens can get, there's like a skin, it functions similarly to like a skin, it functions similarly to like a skin infection. There's like little mites that will get on them. You'll notice bald patches. It can be, I mean, it's bad for their health, obviously, like you would not want to be covered in mites. And so there's, there's this kind of mite killer called promethrin. And the way that you, you can apply it in a number of ways, but you basically need to coat the entire chicken. It's essentially a white powder. So what we did when we had to do

it is we just took a giant, a large feed bag and we filled it with Promethrin and we, we put the chickens in it once at a time and just kind of like give them a little shake. So they got covered. You're shaking, baking all of them. And then they're just like wandering around confused and covered in this white powder. Like what the fuck it's just it's very funny i've never done that it's very fun um i mean it's just it's the best way because they get covered very quickly that way like there's you know with mites and dust and stuff you do want to make sure that where they're living is not too moist or not too dusty because they can get like respiratory conditions from that um so you don't yeah you want to make sure that, you know,

they're living in a nice environment. They also, like the biggest health thing you're going to see is that they will peck at each other, right? Especially when you first get your birds, they're going to establish what's called a pecking order, which people have used, heard and used, but literally an order in which they get food. Well, I didn't know the meaning.

I didn't understand what that meant completely until right now, this moment. That's my gift to you, Shane. Very helpful today. A lot of learning. Yeah, it's what they call a knowledge transfer. Yeah, so they'll do that. They'll peck, right?

They'll establish, you know, when you get a new bird, you don't really want to introduce one new bird at once, right? So say, this is how you get fucking conned into having bantams. Because let's say you're you're your garden can support four chickens and then one of your girls dies and

you're sad and you want to get more birds so you're like well we can't we can't go to five full-size chickens so we'll get bantams right like two half-size chickens and that that is good for the social dynamic because they won't one won't get picked on one won't be like the new girl and then they they like pick on her um But then you've got bantams. And then you're just, I don't know. I'm not, no, it's not very pro bantam. They're just difficult. Wait, so how do they establish the pecking order?

They peck at each other and then what? They peck at each other, yeah. And then what? Well, basically one of the, well, it's just like any other like physical confrontation. Like they peck at each other and like, okay, well, you're harder than me. I like, I can't, you know, I'm not here for that uh so back down sometimes they will really start picking

on one and then you do have to separate them for a while um so you just got to watch out for that and you're going to be vigilant and when you first get them you're going to be excited and you're going to want to go outside and like interact with them so um you know you'll be watching that anyway so just you know make sure you have treats and stuff and and separate them and don't be scared like they can't hurt you they're chickens but um yeah it's normal for them to peck at each other you've got to keep an eye out for if they do draw blood like robert said they are fucking dinosaurs and they will just hone in on that so that's when you have to separate them or come in with your purple spray um so yeah you just have to make sure that you're aware of that and you said that they pecked at your leg when it was bleeding does that hurt?

a little bit you wouldn't do it recreationally yeah maybe some people would you know you do you I'm not here to yuck your yum if you are turned on by being pecked by chickens it's not

they're not like full body attack. I walk in every day to feed my chickens and I don't get pecked or anything. They're fine. They're not like attack animals. Look, and chickens, by the way,

are like every other creature. Some of them are assholes, right? Yes. Any kind of animal that you have and any kind of... They have personalities. Some of them are dicks yeah yeah i remember like on that subject i was um a few years ago i was writing about

rattlesnake behavior for uh this story and uh there's this one fucking rattlesnake which literally every time i ride past it it's just like bam like it will fucking try like i was talking to the snake behavior expert and he's like, yeah, man, that one's an asshole. Some of them are just jackasses. I don't know what to tell you, dude. You've just come across a bellend. It is what it is. So yeah, sometimes you're just going to have a chicken which is mean.

You've just got to hope it doesn't, you know. You've got to make your choice then, right? If it's really causing chaos in the flock, what are you going to do with it? Yeah. That may be a chicken that you eat um yeah which by the way one of the things you learn keeping chickens is how wildly we have fucked up the chickens that we use for meat because like a normal chicken does not produce

breast meat that is that size like it is the size of like a normal grocery store chicken breast those are from monsters that we made well yeah that's like breast meat was popular so they made that like they inserted like a hormone or whatever to make that part of the chicken grow and yeah i mean i've seen videos of like the chicken toppling over because that's so heavy yeah it's madness yeah it's so sad and then bones are not fully developed like it's very cruel like i am yeah it's fucked up yeah yeah i don't eat meat like i'm not really like down with the way the american commercial agriculture raises animals at all i grew up on a farm like i've raised animals my whole life i'm with you i agree fucking touching uh yeah cheap cheap meat in the store i understand other people do you go to feed your families whatever and obviously one way or the other if you're raising chickens

like and you at some point you know the chicken is going to die if at all possible i think you do kind of have a responsibility to find some use for that meat yeah it just said they're sick in which case yeah obviously if they get like yeah i had to i had to kill two last year because they got like some sort of avian flu and yeah yeah the state people will come and take them away and do an autopsy if they do get sick like that and so that's nice to know because then you know do I have to worry about the rest of my flock or is there something in the soil

is there something I'm feeding them if you have concerns like that it's nice to have them do that That's a really good note You are responsible for them you have to give them the best life they can and the kindest death You're responsible for them suffering as have to give them the best life they can and the kindest death.

You're responsible for them suffering as little as possible in their little lives. We used to buy chickens when I was a kid from a guy who bred chickens for a battery farm and we'd go and get them as chicks and just be like, you, you, you, you, you are going to run around our farm all day and have a wonderful life and I'm so sorry the rest of you have this fucking horrible existence.

Yeah. But it was nice to save some of them. It's going to be hard to get chickens right now. So my last thing was really like when you're buying chickens, right? Where are you going to get your chickens from? So hopefully, you know, where you live, you have like a farm shop. Steal them. Liberate them from a battery farm.

Shoot your way in. That's it. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's worth it. They have a right to free them. You will probably, well i i actually think people have literally gotten domestic terrorism charges for that yes well i think it was pigs wasn't it that they got yeah yeah uh chickens are not charismatic enough for people to go to prison

over yeah i know it's unfair it's unfair it's racism really yeah there's one thing we could tell you as a group of individuals legally responsible for what we say it's uh arm yourself and liberate poultry yeah fight your way in like the only not the only but the the most concrete evidence of like dinosaurs have like now devolved into these chickens you know what i mean like that is so funny to me that out of all the animals that is the closest thing we have to a dinosaur. That is so... Tiny velociraptor.

They are dinosaurs. And again, their favorite food is their own kind. And also like, like they will like, every now and then I will give them

some of their eggs just because it makes them so happy to eat. Well, I was going to ask like what, you said that it tasted different when you gave them meat. Like what is the difference

that you caught in the taste when they do eat their own eggs versus like just the feed? Oh no. I mean, their, their own eggs don't, I've never fed them enough for it to be a meaningful component of their, their diet.

They will eat scrambled egg, cottage cheese. They like to, you know, when they're sick. Can you, can you like taste a difference? If you give them herbs.

So like one thing that people do is give them little bundles of herbs and, uh can taste that in the egg yeah yeah it's just kind of richer you know when you yeah like you'll notice different like if you if they are calcium deficient the eggs are really fragile and if they have a shitload of calcium in their diet like my eggs are like you you have to like you have to want to crack those fuckers. If you feed them flax seeds, then the eggs have a higher omega-3 content. Oh, I didn't know that. It makes sense.

It's super interesting, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you can give them flax seeds and that kind of thing. You can mess with their diet a bit, and they like that stuff. So yeah, when you're buying them, what you want, I think, as a beginner, is like a point-of-lay bird, and you can say point-of-lay, and that's what they'll give you want, I think, as a beginner is like a point of lay bird. And you can say point of lay.

And that's what they'll give you. They're going to try and give you pullets or they're going to try and say it's nice to raise chicks. And it is. It's really nice to raise chicks. But some of them will die and that will be upsetting for you. And it's hard. It's a lot of work. That's a general note.

Any lifetime, if you decide that you want to be a person who has livestock, you have to be okay with them dying. And it being an experience that is more direct to you than like, obviously it's not as emotional as like when a cat or a dog dies, but it will not involve a vet with the kind of frequency that like a dying pet does. Like you will have to deal with, you know, animals die. Because animals just die. Sometimes they wind up with the same kind of ailments people have, where like an animal's heart will give out or something. pet does like you will have to deal with uh you know animals die because animals just die sometimes

they wind up with the same kind of ailments people have where like an animal's heart will give out or something and you didn't do anything wrong it's just an animal was born with a heart defect right it's just like a thing that occurs if you have enough animals yeah we used to say if you have livestock you'll have dead stock one day yeah like it's just something you have to face up to but like someone else is already doing that shit and they're probably doing it with less compassion than you yeah you're buying you know walmart eggs so you like i say you you can't you're not god but like you owe these animals like a decent life and yeah as little suffering as you can so yeah by the point of lay chickens uh make sure that they're sexed right you you don't want a rooster you might

not legally be able to have a rooster. And then something like a dog container is fine. I bought them home in a shoebox before. I'll just put them next to me in my truck, and they're pretty chill. I give them a little bit of water in there, but generally they don't want a drink. You can kind of swaddle them.

I've seen people swaddle them. If they're really panicking or whatever. Swaddling is like when you wrap them, like you would with a baby. Like a burrito. And people do that, I know, when they have to move them in like a hurricane to try and calm them down.

But I've always just put them in a dog container. Oh, are we going to talk about storing eggs? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because people don't fucking... Yeah, this is a weird American thing. Yeah. Yeah, fuck. So this doesn't happen in the rest of the world but you guys get your eggs refrigerated uh and that's because they're washed before they come to you yeah you don't need to do

this normally no you shouldn't wash your eggs nor should you refrigerate them just uh i have a little helter skelter thing. It just looks like a spiral, right? And you put the egg on the top and it just rolls its little way down until it gets to the bottom. And that way I always take them from the bottom. And that way I'm, I'm always sort of getting the oldest eggs first.

So I don't end up with like one at the bottom of the basket. Right. So you don't wash them. No, just, just bring it in. not until you're ready to eat them. Obviously wash them before you cook them.

Cause some of them will have poop and stuff on them. Right. Right. Right. But before that, just bring them in. No, not until you're ready to eat them. Obviously, wash them before you cook them because some of them will have poop and stuff on them. Right, right. Right, but before that, just keep them normal. They'll last for months like that. Oh, yeah. I've never had a bad egg. There are a couple of other ways to store them. Obviously, you could pickle them.

Be very careful with that if you are canning them. I would recommend just pickling them and putting them in the fridge because hard-bo because eggs in particular like hard boiled eggs in particular are troublesome to can because there's always, if you think about hard boiled eggs, there's always like little bitty cracks in like the white of the egg and

that is where botulism can live. So be extremely careful if you are pickling eggs. Just, I would recommend don't like you know, can them specifically specifically just pickle them and put them in the fridge and you know they'll last a pretty good amount of time yeah pickled eggs are delicious yeah it's wonderful is the is the thing about not refrigerating the eggs so you do you actually still have to refrigerate like yeah if you're from the store if you yes yes you can like

in this country yes yeah you can roll them in vegetable oil and I think ash, which replicates the way that they have a membrane on them. I hadn't heard about that. But fair, like all intent. If you're buying them from... They have a membrane on them? Yes. Yeah, when they come out. Like a little hole, basically.

Yeah, like it kind of fills the pores on the outside of the egg, I think, as I understand it. So if you really wanted to store them and you didn't have access to a refrigerator, you could do the oil and ash thing. You should look it up. The other thing you can do that is, because again, if you have any quantity of chickens,

there's a good chance that they will produce, like I have a problem with this, significantly more eggs than you can consume. An interesting way to, are you going to talk about water glassing? Oh no, talk about it though. Yeah. You can look like,

look it up. I'm not going to give you a guide over this because preserving stuff is something that you should take care on, but you can Google water glassing. It's basically a way you can keep eggs for like up to a year that way. Yeah. In like crackable, friable condition.

But I think we are getting the note that James and I should stop talking about chickens for now. We can continue in another episode. James and I will talk about chickens privately after this and you all aren't privy to it. James said it. People love to talk about their chickens. They do. They do.

They do love to talk about chickens. Yeah. Maybe we'll start a side podcast for Patreon reasons. Chicken cast. Chicken cast. Chicken cast. Anyway. Poultry pod. Until next time, take a lesson from the chickens and eat your own young.

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