Why Are Chickens The Perfect Pet For Children (and Adults)?

The perfect pet for children, and for adults, is to keep chickens. Keeping chickens has a number of benefits including the provision of wonderful free range eggs for the fridge and the capacity of chickens to eat all those rotten bugs that are eating your flowers.

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.

Once you’ve researched the regulations and found out what you can and cannot do then there is no reason why the average suburban dweller cannot keep backyard chickens.

I am often asked how many chickens to have and what breed of chickens to buy.

Of course this is, in both cases, a matter of personal choice, however as a general guideline you will find that a good layer will produce around 300 eggs per year. Or roughly 5 to 6 eggs per week. This will subside during the winter.

And so from this you can make a calculation to determine how many hens will supply sufficient eggs to keep your family in omelettes.

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.

On that basis, for the average family, 3 or 4 hens is usually sufficient, though more is more fun.

And the breed of chickens that you choose depends on why you want chickens. Are you buying them for their looks or for their eggs?

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.

For egg laying we tend to select Isa Browns. These are a good chook for laying plenty of eggs, though one drawback of Isa Browns is that they rarely sit on eggs, so if you want chicks each year Isa Browns may not deliver. Their lack of enthusiasm for sitting on eggs is the reason they are good layers, because once they start to sit on eggs they stop laying.

If you have chicks it’s just wonderful and the kids love it. But the downside is that you will have to find something to do with those roosters, and unless you want to find that your small brood of 3 or 4 hens grows to 10 or 15 you will also have to find something to do with the hens.

However these are small problems when compared to the delights of keeping chickens as pets, and also of having those wonderful, tasty and fresh free range eggs to eat every day.

Peter’s website is at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au