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Published:
December 5, 2019

Raising Chickens For Dummies

Overview

Your hands-on guide to modern chicken-raising methods

Thinking about raising chickens? You've come to the right place! This new edition of Raising Chickens For Dummies provides the most up-to-date, thorough information on the many aspects of keeping chickens in your backyard. Inside, you'll find hands-on, easy-to-follow instructions on choosing and purchasing chickens, constructing housing for your birds, feeding your chickens for optimal health, combating laying issues, controlling pests and predators, optimizing egg production, and much more.

Raising chickens on a small scale is a popular—and growing—pastime. If you're interested in keeping chickens as pets or as a source for eggs, Raising Chickens For Dummies gives you plain-English explanations of everything you need to know to about caring for chickens. Inside, you'll learn about basic chicken biology, breeds, and behavior, which chicken breed is best for you, how many you need, ways to spot healthy chickens, how to build a chicken coop, best practices for mating your chickens, how to incubate eggs, how to hatch and nurture chicks, manage laying hens, collect and store eggs, and butcher meat birds.

  • Offers practical advice on choosing and purchasing chickens
  • Helps you construct the right housing for your chickens
  • Provides tips on feeding and caring for your chickens
  • Includes top tips for raising healthy chickens

Whether you're a first-time poulterer or you've been raising chickens for years, this comprehensive guide provides practical how-to advice for keeping chickens in virtually any backyard.

Raising Chickens For Dummies (9781119675921) was previously published as Raising Chickens For Dummies (9781118982785). While this version features a new Dummies cover and design, the content is the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.

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About The Author

Kimberley Willis has raised numerous breeds of chickens and other poultry for eggs, meat, and showing for more than 40 years.

Robert T. Ludlow owns and manages BackYardChickens.com, the largest and fastest-growing community of chicken enthusiasts in the world.

Sample Chapters

raising chickens for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Raising chickens can be fun and rewarding. Whether you’re raising birds for their eggs or for their cackling companionship, caring for your birds is an everyday project. Raising happy and healthy birds means knowing how to take care of baby chicks and what to feed them as they mature.Daily chores to keep your chickens healthyIf you’re raising chickens, whether for eggs, meat, or companionship, you want your fowl to stay healthy.

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Articles from
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The very word chicken brings up the image of a coward, but chickens aren’t really cowards. Here’s a compilation of the most common myths and misconceptions about chickens and eggs that you may encounter as a chicken owner — or chicken‐keeper wannabe. Maybe some of these bits of misinformation are actually keeping you from getting some chickens of your own.
In addition to basic needs like food and rest, chickens need as little stress as possible to be able to perform well. You’re probably aware of how stress affects people and how it impacts their health. Stress can affect chickens’ health, too. Stress in chickens may lead to fighting and injury, improper nutrition, and a lowered immune response to disease.
How do you know if your chickens are normal and healthy? Here are nine signs. Eyes: Chicken eyes should be clear and shiny. When a chicken is alert and active, its eyelids shouldn’t be showing. You shouldn’t see any discharge or swelling around the eyes. Nose: Both nostrils should be clear and open, with no discharge from the nostrils.
Watching a flock of chickens can be as entertaining as watching teenagers at the mall. Chickens have very complex social interactions and a host of interesting behaviors. And like most domesticated animals, chickens prefer to be kept in groups. A group of chickens is called a flock.Knowing a little about chicken behavior is crucial to keeping chickens.
Chickens can take as much time and money as you care to spend, but you need to recognize the minimum time, space, and money commitments required to keep chickens. Time spent tending your chickens Naturally, setting up housing for your birds takes some time. If you’re building a chicken coop, give yourself plenty of time to finish before you acquire the birds.
In the not-so-distant past, most meat chickens were young males that were the excess offspring from laying or show birds. They were kept just long enough to make a good meal — and that usually meant about 5 to 6 months of feeding and caring for the young roosters. The excess males in most heavy, generally brown-egg-laying breeds of chickens were used as meat.
For home flocks, brown-egg layers are popular. The brown eggs these birds lay can vary from light tan to deep chocolate brown, sometimes even within the same breed. As hens get older, their eggs tend to be lighter in color. Some of the best brown-egg layers follow: Isa Brown: This hybrid makes up the world’s largest population of brown-egg layers.
Like the brown-egg layers, the colored-egg layers are also popular with home flock owners. Colored-egg layers are a novelty. Despite catalogs that show eggs in a rainbow of colors, their eggs are actually shades of blue and blue-green. Sometimes brown-egg layers whose eggs are a creamy light brown are said to lay yellow eggs.
As you explore the world of chicken breeds, you’re likely to come across a handful of commonly used terms: purebreds, hybrids, strains, mutations, and mixed breeds. Purebred chickens Purebred chickens are chickens that have been bred to similar chickens for a number of generations and that share a genetic similarity.
Serious illness is unlikely in a backyard chicken flock, especially if you vaccinate the chickens. All the same, it’s good to be aware of illnesses in case you're ever wondering, is my chicken sick? Diseases can spread from wild birds and pests, so keep an eye out during your daily health checks for the symptoms listed below.
So, what exactly do we mean by "neighbors" in this context? Neighbors are any people who are in sight, sound, and smelling distance of your chickens. Even if it’s legal in your urban or suburban area to keep chickens, the law may require your neighbors’ approval and continued tolerance. And it pays to keep your neighbors happy anyway.
If you’re raising chickens, whether for eggs or meat, you want your fowl to stay healthy. Healthy chickens need attention and care every day. The following, simple measures, taken daily, help to keep your chickens healthy: Keep water available at all times. This may mean a heat source to keep water from freezing in winter.
Home flock owners often want chickens that will give them a decent amount of eggs and also be meaty enough so that they can use excess birds as meat birds. The eggs taste the same; you just don’t get as many as you do from laying breeds. The meat tastes the same if you raise the dual-purpose birds like you raise meat birds, but their breasts are smaller and the birds grow much more slowly.
Some people choose to feed their chickens an organic diet, either because they believe it’s healthier for the chickens or because they want to produce organic eggs or meat (or both). An organic diet means that the foods the chickens eat come from natural ingredients that are grown without pesticides. Some people also define organic as foods that don’t come from genetically modified plants.
Many poor chicks have been strangled by the loving grasp of children. Chicken owners need to learn the proper ways of catching and holding chickens of all ages and sizes. Children need to be taught how to correctly catch and hold chickens, too, if they’re allowed to handle them. Children under age 5 probably shouldn’t be allowed to hold chicks without close adult supervision.
When you get interested in breeding your own chickens, you may become interested in showing them. At poultry shows across the United States and in most other countries, proud poultry owners can show others what their breeding programs can produce. As with other forms of domestic animal showings, poultry show winners receive trophies, ribbons, and often cash rewards.
Determining which breeds are rare is difficult because many poultry breeds are getting scarce. The genetics of many breeds need to be preserved because the genetic pool of chickens is becoming limited. Poultry breeds go through fads: For example, the current craze is for chickens that lay very dark brown eggs.
Chickens are very vocal creatures, and they communicate with each other frequently. Chickens are rarely quiet for long unless they are sleeping. The range of sounds that chickens make is wide and somewhat open to human interpretation, but some of the sounds are defined here: Crowing: The loud “cock-a-doodle-do” a rooster makes is the chicken noise most people know best.
Many new chicken owners want to know how chickens interact with other poultry or animals. Many people envision a happy barnyard mixture of chickens and other poultry, or perhaps goats and horses. You can have that peaceful environment, in most cases, if you have some knowledge of how chickens interact with other animals.
Being called a birdbrain is supposed to indicate that you’re not very smart. Bird brains may be organized more like reptile brains than mammal brains, but plenty of evidence indicates that birds, including chickens, are pretty smart. Scientists have recently discovered that while the “thinking” area of a bird’s brain may look different from the same part of a mammal’s brain, birds are capable of thought processes that even some species of mammals can’t achieve.
Chicken parasites are a given in most backyard coops. External parasites — lice, mites, fowl tick, and chiggers — are the creepy-crawlies found on the outside of the chicken, so common that earlier poultry tenders didn’t even bother treating chickens for them. That said, these pests can cause anemia, damaged feathers, weight problems, poor laying, or — in young birds — death.
Raising chickens means taking care of them from the time they’re little puff balls with feet. To start your chicks off right so that they grow into healthy adults, make use of the following tips: Brooder: Confine the chicks in a brooder with solid sides about 18 inches high to keep out drafts. Make sure the brooder is near a heat source, probably a heat lamp.
Some adult chickens are still shipped by air, but airlines are getting fussier about transporting animals and may not carry them at certain times of the year. You may have to go to the airport to pick up adult birds instead of having them sent through the U.S. Mail to your post office. If you’re going to a breeder to pick up birds, bring a proper carrier.
Domestic breeds of chickens are derived from wild chickens that still crow in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The Red Jungle fowl is thought to be the primary ancestor of domestic breeds, but the Gray Jungle fowl has also contributed some genes. Wild chickens are still numerous in many parts of southern Asia, and chickens have escaped captivity and gone feral or “wild” in many subtropical regions in other parts of the world.
Information is power, even when it comes to raising chickens. For that reason, here are some book and website resources to further enhance your raising chicken experience. Flipping through books No one book can ever contain everything you may be interested in knowing about chickens, so here are a few books that make great resources.
If you’ve ever surfed the web and visited chicken sites like www.backyardchickens.com, you’ve probably seen some chicken coops that are really, shall we say, tricked out. They have chandeliers, lace curtains, window boxes of exotic flowers, and fine art hanging on the coop walls. These coops may not be very practical, but the chickens probably don’t mind the extras — and the owners have something to brag about.
Feathers cover most of the chicken’s body. Most breeds of chickens have bare legs, but some have feathers growing down their legs and even on their toes. Other variations of feathering include muffs, puffs of feathers around the ear lobes; beards, long, hanging feathers beneath the beak; and crests or topknots, poofs of feathers on the head that may fall down and cover the eyes.
If you’ve ever considered butchering your own chickens, there are a few things you need to know. After you butcher your chickens, you need to package the meat so it stays fresh and wholesome in the freezer. Types of packaging You have these common choices for packaging home-butchered poultry: Plastic freezer bags: The most common packaging for freezer meat is the plastic freezer bag.
One of the oldest and most successful methods of keeping chickens is to provide them with a shelter they can retreat to at night or in bad weather and an outside enclosure that protects them from predators yet allows them access to fresh air and sunshine. The figure illustrates this type of housing. Credit: Illustration by Barbara Frake Walk-in shelters allow the caretaker to feed and water the birds and collect eggs inside.
In chickens, selective breeding using the smallest birds of each generation has produced small breeds called bantams. A few breeds have some dwarf genes. People have always enjoyed seeing miniature versions of domestic animals. Bantam chickens are primarily kept for show or as pets, as are most other small versions of domestic animals.
Raising chickens can be fun and rewarding. Whether you’re raising birds for their eggs or for their cackling companionship, caring for your birds is an everyday project. Raising happy and healthy birds means knowing how to take care of baby chicks and what to feed them as they mature.Daily chores to keep your chickens healthyIf you’re raising chickens, whether for eggs, meat, or companionship, you want your fowl to stay healthy.
Some breeds of chickens exist today mainly for pleasure. They may have been used as layers or meat birds in the past, but better breeds came along and replaced them. The practice of showing chickens keeps many of these breeds alive. They make excellent lawn ornaments and pets, too: Cochin: Cochins originated in China.
The most significant parts of a chicken’s head are the comb, the eyes and ears, the beak and nostrils, and the wattles and the neck. Following is a closer look at each of these parts, from the head down. The chicken's comb At the very top of the chicken’s head is a fleshy red area called the comb. The combs of Silkie chickens, a small breed, are very dark maroon red.
Chickens are notorious for eating almost anything. Their taste buds are not well developed, and tastes that most consider bad don’t faze them. This can be their downfall if they eat something like Styrofoam, paint chips, fertilizer, or other things that look like food to them. Good chicken-keepers need to protect their charges from eating things like pesticide-coated vegetation, plastic, Styrofoam beads, and other harmful items.
If you’re raising chickens, remembering what feed you need for different types and ages of chickens can get confusing. What you feed a young layer is different than what you feed a mature meat bird. The following table gives you the essentials: Chicken Type (Age) Feed Protein Ratio Pet, show, and layer chicks
If you want hens that lay a certain color of eggs, you can read breed descriptions or you can look at the color of the skin patch around the ear. Hens that have white skin around the ear generally lay white eggs. It’s important to remember that all colors of eggs have exactly the same nutritional qualities and taste.
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