All Episodes
Previous Next
March 20, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
15:33
BACKYARD CHICKENS: What you need to know
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Mike Adams.
You know, it's like 700,000 people have been killed by SSRI drugs alone since the year 2000.
It's unreal.
The Health Ranger Report.
The drug industry has declared war on humanity, and the prostitutes in Washington are just going right along with it.
They don't give a damn.
It's time for the Health Ranger Report.
And now, from NaturalNews.com, here's Mike Adams.
Alright, this is a podcast about backyard chickens.
My name's Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
Thank you for joining me.
This is HealthRangerReports.com.
I'm the editor of NaturalNews.com.
I'm also a food research scientist, lab director of cwclabs.com.
And I've been raising backyard chickens for, I don't know, five or six years now, something like that.
I have a lot of experience with chickens, what works, what doesn't work.
I'm going to share a lot of that with you here.
I don't kill the chickens that I raise for meat, but we do eat the eggs.
So right now, actually, we're getting about three dozen eggs a day or something like that, a lot.
Which is great.
But raising chickens has its challenges.
First of all, I want you to know it's very rewarding if you do it right.
And you've got to have the space because chickens need that open space in order to be healthy.
If you have your chickens cooped up, you're going to end up having to put them on all kinds of antibiotics and chemicals, which is what the commercial chicken farms do or chicken factories like Tyson do.
And that's not the way you want to raise chickens.
You want free-range chickens, right?
So if you don't have the space, don't try to stack a bunch of chickens into a small space.
They'll end up getting disease, or you'll end up having to vaccinate them all, or put them on antibiotics, or whatever, and then you're just doing the same thing that factory chickens are subjected to, and that's not your goal, right?
Pretty simple.
Okay, so have the space.
Secondly, If you treat your chickens with respect, you'll find that they are astonishingly intelligent and have interesting human-like behaviors.
For example, and I'm not saying they're nearly as intelligent as people, because they are.
They're still birds.
They're still relatively stupid.
But they're a lot smarter than a lot of other animals.
And mama chickens will, for example, teach their babies what to eat.
And if I toss out a bunch of food...
And there are baby chicks out there hanging around their mothers.
The mothers are going to pick up the food, take it to their babies, put it down on the ground in front of the babies, and then they cluck in a certain way to tell their babies, eat this food.
This is food for eating.
So mothers actually teach their baby chicks what to eat, how to eat.
They teach scratching behavior.
To scratch the ground and look for things to eat.
They also engage in sunbathing behavior, believe it or not.
Chickens will sunbathe to put UV light inside their feathers and underneath their feathers.
They'll also take a dirt bath.
So they'll sit down in a pile of dirt.
And then they'll shove dirt in between their feathers and try to use dirt as a way to eliminate pests.
So they are very good at some self-care types of behaviors, and they'll teach that to their children.
So they're actually more nurturing than you might think.
If you've never raised chickens, you might not know about this kind of behavior.
On the other hand, chickens can be very vicious and mean, especially the males.
And male chickens, which are called roosters, of course, they're basically serial rapists.
Their job is to run around and rape all the hens all day long.
That's pretty much what they do.
And if you have too many male chickens around, your hens will get brutalized.
Seriously, they'll lose their feathers, they'll be bloodied on their backs and everything because of the way that the roosters mount them.
In order to conduct all the rapings.
And they will chase the hens down and the roosters will use their beaks, their mouths, to grab the feathers on the backs of the heads of the hens to control them.
And roosters can run faster than hens, so they can always catch the hen.
So they chase the hen down, they grab the back of its head, kind of like Pulling someone by their hair, and they force them to submit, and then they hop on their backs with their claws, and they rape them.
And this is, you know, what roosters do, which is why you can't have too many roosters.
So this is why people who buy chickens always want to avoid males.
And by the way, the way we ended up with a rooster in the first place, and now we have more than one rooster, is because we bought a bunch of chickens commercially, like, many years ago.
They were all supposed to be females.
Turns out one of them was a male.
And that will happen.
Sometimes a male slips through the sexing process and you end up with a male chicken.
Which becomes a rooster, which becomes a mad rapist.
So you got to keep all of this in mind.
You need to have a plan for what you're going to do with the males.
You can isolate them and separate them.
Some people kill them and use them for soup.
You know, some people give them away, whatever.
But you can't have your males around all your females in large numbers.
It's good to have one rooster for about every 10 to 12 females.
If you have more than that, you're going to end up with some torn up Hens, which you don't want.
Because they need their feathers, obviously, for lots of reasons.
So anyway, with that said, you know, and look, the reason I'm being so blunt and upfront about this is it's easy to have this dream in your head of this, you know, beautiful green farm and happy chickens frolicking about.
And that's That's the BS dream that is often sold to people about backyard chickens.
It's not actually all that way.
Some of it is that way.
I love seeing baby chicks.
I love seeing the mothers taking care of the babies.
And I love the chickens free-ranging and everything.
But there's another aspect of this that is very difficult to deal with.
And that's all the males who are very aggressive and very violent, by the way.
Now, let's talk about chicken breeds for a minute.
We've had Delaware, Rhode Island Reds, Americanas, and a couple other breeds.
Now, the Americanas, in my experience, are the best at natural nesting.
They will lay eggs in secret locations all around your yard or your farm, whatever you have, and they will sit on the eggs and they will hatch chickens without you even knowing about it.
One day, you're outside and all of a sudden there's a mama with like seven baby chicks.
Just out of the blue, just walking around, looking for stuff to eat.
You didn't even know about it, because they lay the eggs in secret, they hatch them in secret, and then they're out running around with the chicks.
Rhode Island Reds, however, are the most disease-resistant in my experience.
They don't get sick very often.
They're hardy.
And that's why I tend to like Rhode Island Reds.
And they can nest from time to time, but not as much as the Americanas.
Now, the Delaware, they are...
A good breed, and they tend to be a heavier, more like a meat bird, which is not what I'm trying to raise.
But a lot of people raise Delaware for a combination of a meat bird and an egg bird.
The problem with Delaware, in my experience, is that they're white.
And this is not like a racial commentary, like, no whites allowed in the chicken yard.
No.
It's the fact that they're white makes them easy to spot.
By all of the predators that are trying to eat your chickens.
So Rhode Island Reds, and especially Americanas, are more camouflage.
They don't stand out, you know, from 500 yards away in the eyes of some bird of prey in the sky that's trying to grab lunch.
So Delawares will get eaten more, depending on where you live, you know, by all the different predators that are trying to eat your chickens.
You've got to understand that just like chicken McNuggets are sort of the meal for humans in the...
In the eyes of the delusional masses of junk food munchers, little baby chickens are like chicken McNuggets in nature.
Every animal in nature is trying to eat chicken McNuggets, which is your baby chicks, and sometimes your adult chickens, hens, whatever.
Birds of prey will eat your chickens.
And I remember one day...
There was like a, I swear, an egret.
A giant, big-winged egret was attacking the baby chicks of an Americana mom on my ranch.
And all four baby chicks were rescued, by the way.
I rescued them, but the mom was killed by this egret as she was trying to defend her baby chicks against this large bird.
So large birds will attack baby chicks, and the mother chickens will try to defend them, and they will die in the process, as I saw happen.
In any case, I rescued those four baby chicks, and then I raised them.
And they went on to become adults and blended with the flock and everything.
And they went on.
They're fine.
Totally fine.
But their mother was murdered by an egret.
And there are, of course, owls.
Owls will eat baby chicks.
Raccoons will eat chicks.
Snakes, especially.
Rat snakes love to eat chicks.
They will coil around a baby chick and suffocate at first.
And then after they kill it, then they'll swallow it.
They don't just try to eat it whole like living.
They kill it first and then they eat it.
Every kind of animal, like cats, even like feral cats.
You know, if you live in a neighborhood, your neighbor's cats will try to kill your chickens.
And of course, coyotes will try to kill your chickens.
So if you're going to be in the business of raising chickens, you have to start getting into the habit of protecting life.
Well, how do you protect life?
Lots of things.
You know, you can have like a snake-proof cage.
Your chickens need to go up at night.
They need to be in a raccoon-proof cage at night.
I have like a little solar-powered door that opens at sunrise to let them back out.
But all the chickens know they got to go up at night if they want to be safe.
So you need to have a way to protect your chickens.
If you don't, they will all be killed.
Trust me.
If you're anywhere out close to nature...
The coyotes, the foxes, the birds, they will just murder all your chickens all at once.
You'll wake up the next day with just a bunch of dead chickens everywhere and some bodies missing and everything else.
Gone.
Just gone.
And it's heartbreaking if that happens to you, so don't let it happen.
The other thing is, you will have to have a plan for how you're going to deal with raccoons.
Because raccoons are the ultimate chicken thieves.
They can open doors.
Literally, their evil little hands can open doors.
They have thumbs and they can figure out, they can do combination locks.
They can solve Rubik's Cubes if they need to get in anything to get in and eat your chickens.
They can do all that stuff because that's what they're good at.
And they're wearing masks all the time, too.
A little raccoon mask.
They're just evil villains.
They're like the villain, the Hamburglar from McDonald's.
They're just villains.
So you got to decide either you're going to do a live capture of the raccoons.
So you have a big raccoon cage, you know, with some bait inside.
And then they walk in there and the door shuts on them and you got them.
You got them.
Just don't stick your fingers in there.
They'll rip your fingers off, by the way.
So you either got to do that or you got to decide you're going to use a shotgun and kill them.
You know, one or the other.
There's really no in between because the raccoons are going to go after your chickens.
Oh, actually, there is a third choice.
And that is you can have a big ass dog in your yard.
A raccoon-eating dog, which is what I have, by the way.
A large raccoon-eating dog.
And he hasn't actually eaten raccoons for a while because he's been chasing them all off, which is the preferred solution to all of this.
I would rather the raccoons just run away.
But I have seen him kill raccoons, which is really a big part of his job.
A dog to protect the chickens can be a very, very good thing.
Just remember, you've got to train your puppies not to eat your chickens.
And that's hard because puppies love to eat things with feathers that squawk and scream and run and flee.
So, you see, the balance here becomes very complex.
You're probably going to end up with not just chickens, but a dog to protect the chickens and a firearm as a last resort in case You know, you might have to euthanize a chicken that's been injured by a bird.
I had to do that once.
It was very heartbreaking.
A bird swoops out of the sky like a falcon, you know, a bird of prey, and eats half your chicken, but it's not quite dead yet.
You've got to do the rest of the euthanasia, put it out of its misery as just a favor to the bird, you know, so it doesn't suffer.
So if you're going to take on raising backyard chickens, you need to be psychologically prepared To deal with life and death and deal with protection and safety of the chickens.
You're going to have predators that are trying to murder them.
You're going to have to take steps to protect the chickens.
And every once in a while you're going to have a chicken that gets sick, too, and that doesn't make it.
So you're going to deal with it.
You know, it's reality.
If you're living out in the country and raising chickens, you are dealing with the real world, which is a great exercise, by the way.
If you do it right, it makes you more humble.
It makes you honor life more.
It makes you closer to Mother Nature because you understand the challenges of protecting life and the cycles of life and death and birth and, you know, raising baby chicks and, you know, keeping your chickens alive and interacting with the entire ecosystem.
It's a very useful and enlightening endeavor, but it is not without its heartbreaks.
So be psychologically prepared for all these things to happen.
In any case, if I haven't yet dissuaded you, having backyard chicks is actually a very rewarding thing.
I recommend it to anyone as long as you're not afraid to function in the real world and deal with some of these challenges.
But it will make you a stronger person.
It will make you more self-reliant.
It will make you more resilient to all of these issues that you'll be facing when society starts to collapse, you know, when things start to really hit the fan.
So I think it's a great exercise.
Thank you for listening.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
You can hear more podcasts at healthrangerreport.com.
▲
Export Selection