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Feb. 6, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
10:32
Important advice for those getting chickens for the first time
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Are you thinking about having chickens this coming spring?
I mean, springtime is just around the corner.
And given the price of eggs right now, probably lots of people want to get chickens and then want to get some eggs.
And I'm here to just give you some advice.
I've had backyard chickens.
My flock has been as large as maybe 50 chickens at one point, 50 hens, a couple of roosters.
I've done this for maybe 12 years or so.
And it's been very rewarding.
I have some advice for first-time people, if you're thinking of getting into this.
Number one, make sure you have a safe place for your chickens to roost at night.
That is safe from predators.
And by predators, I include raccoons.
Nothing will tear up your chickens faster than raccoons, especially if you have smaller hens.
And raccoons will also, of course, steal the eggs.
But they'll tear up your chickens, too.
I mean, they are vicious.
Raccoons are kind of the worst enemy of chickens, but coyotes also count as well.
And there are some birds of prey, falcons and hawks and so on, that can swoop down and kill your chickens and eat them.
But the number one thing you have to watch out for is raccoons at night coming in and just ripping your chickens to shreds.
So my advice is to have a chicken coop with an automatic door.
And there's a battery powered light sensitive chicken door that you can find out there.
I don't recall the brand of it, but it's made out of metal and the vertical door slides up or down and it has a photo sensor on it and it's very good about the timing.
It doesn't falsely open or falsely close.
It will close long after your chickens have already come in and roosted, and it'll protect them during the night, and then this door opens automatically in the morning when the sun comes out, and it lets your chickens out.
This is by far the best thing.
It uses, I believe, a 6-volt battery that you have to change about once a year.
This is a great system.
It works.
It's reliable.
So again, you want a chicken coop or you can buy some kind of like a wooden shed even and you can put chicken shelves in it and they'll jump up on the shelves.
Remember that chickens like to roost off the ground.
That's a survival instinct.
They don't want to sleep on the ground.
They want to be off the ground.
So if you have a little building with rafters in it, your chickens will go up, they'll fly up to the rafters and they'll sleep in the rafters.
They like that.
Those are their, you know, perch locations.
And it'll make them happy.
Also beware of snakes.
So in Texas, we have what are called rat snakes, which eat eggs and they eat small chickens.
And they try to eat medium-sized chickens, which ends up killing the chicken, even though it's not eaten.
But a lot of these snakes, they can't figure out exactly how big of a chicken they can eat.
So they will attack the chicken's head.
They'll die.
Snap at the head, bite the head, and swallow the chicken's head, which suffocates the chicken.
And then the snake will find out that it can't really swallow the rest of the chicken because it's too big and so it'll spit back out the head.
And what you'll find is a dead chicken with a kind of snake saliva covered head.
You're like, what happened here?
Well, a snake tried to eat it and the snake gave up.
That's what happened.
When I first saw that, I couldn't figure it out.
I was like, what kind of freaky creature Is suffocating and drooling over the heads of these chickens, and eventually we figured it out.
It's snakes.
That's what's doing that.
How do you protect your chickens from snakes?
Well, the best way I've found is to just not have small chickens when the snakes come out.
And in Texas, the snakes come out when the weather warms up in late spring.
So snakes will be out from March through about June, and then they get really plentiful in that time.
And I don't shoot those snakes personally.
I capture them and I relocate them.
But that's just me.
Some people choose to shoot them.
Even if you shoot them, more will come.
Trust me.
There are years where I have captured and relocated something like 40 to 50 rat snakes, and some of them quite large.
I mean, big, thick, like an inch and a half diameter maybe, and over five feet long, and athletic, very strong, very capable.
These snakes can climb trees.
I've seen them slither up an oak tree just on the bark alone.
Just go vertical.
Boom, they're up in the tree.
They can leap from one structure to another.
I've seen them do that, trust me.
I've fought them as they're trying to escape the snake grabber while I'm trying to relocate them.
And occasionally they get away, but my skills with the snake grabber are getting quite good, so most of them don't get away.
But anyway, you've got to beware of snakes, and the snakes will eat your eggs.
And it's not only just that they're stealing your eggs, but they're also then using those eggs to, of course, produce more snakes.
So if you don't stop the snakes from eating your eggs, you're going to have a lot more snakes next season.
So keep that in mind.
Now, in terms of keeping your chickens healthy, let me tell you, I don't vaccinate my hens for obvious reasons.
Never have, never will.
I don't feed them pharmaceuticals.
What I do is I give them free-range access to a very large area.
So they are able to free-range and they can eat a lot of bugs and weeds.
And they can defecate in a wide area where it's not piling up into one small area.
They're not walking in their own poop, for example.
This is really critical.
You've got to keep your chickens clean and give them plenty of space.
Now they'll poop inside the coop, but what you can do is you can go to a feed store and you can buy large bags of zeolites.
I think it's called PDZ. And it's very inexpensive and you can just sprinkle the zeolite powder On the floor of your chicken coop, which should have maybe straw or some kind of maybe hay if you've got extra hay or something like that on the floor, sprinkle the zeolites on it and it'll keep down the ammonia.
And it will mean that you don't have to rake that out and change the floor as often if you're using zeolites.
And so that creates a healthier indoor environment for your chickens because you don't want your chickens breathing in ammonia all the time.
That will tend to make them sick.
The other thing is they have to have access to clean water.
Now, in the water, you don't want to use city water because you don't want all the chlorine and all the chemicals in it.
But you can use their water as a kind of antiseptic delivery system by putting chlorine dioxide in the water, which kills any pathogens in the water, and it also tends to kill pathogens in the chickens themselves.
So you know how you have the A bottle and the B bottle for chlorine dioxide, which has also been called MMS, Miracle Mineral Solution?
So if I'm getting a bucket of water for the chickens, I'll just put a few drops of the A and a few drops of the B, like maybe 10 or 15 drops in the bucket of water so there's a small amount of chlorine dioxide in that water and that's what chickens drink.
So the bucket stays clean, and the chickens get the beneficial effects of that as well.
And I think that's one of the reasons why my chickens are so healthy, and they rarely get sick, although it has happened before.
But that was before I found out about chlorine dioxide, by the way.
Since using chlorine dioxide, they don't get sick.
Now, I do lose chickens occasionally.
One time there was a falcon that came down and ate one of my chickens.
Well, I tried to.
I have seen that happen.
I've lost chickens to containers and it's something else I want to warn you about.
Don't leave any containers sitting out that a chicken can hop up on the edge of it and the container tips over and covers the chicken.
Because in the summer that thing will heat up because it's like the chicken under a bucket or under a bin or something and it'll cook the chicken.
And it'll just kill it very quickly.
And sadly, I've had that happen.
That was one of the earlier lessons I learned.
Don't have any containers open that can tip over onto chickens.
That includes buckets and bins and whatever else that you can think of.
Okay?
Because they'll try to hop on the edge and it'll tip over on them.
And be careful about anything where a chicken might get trapped, like an open barrel, for example, or a piece of equipment where a chicken could get stuck inside and not be able to get out.
You'll end up losing chickens that way if you're not careful.
They're kind of curious.
They try to hop around And sometimes chickens, especially if you have roosters and you have fertile eggs, some hens will try to find a secret place to lay their eggs.
And they will.
And they'll hatch a bunch of baby chicks.
And you'll be shocked.
This happened to me.
I was like, whoa, where'd these 10 baby chickens come from?
And, you know, the mother hen had hidden them well and she had sat on them and incubated them and actually hatched them.
So be prepared for that as a possibility.
So that's kind of an overview of my simple advice.
Do some online research, watch some videos, maybe get a book.
If you're going to buy hens, baby chicks, do so responsibly.
Don't be an irresponsible owner where your chickens are just going to get eaten by raccoons and coyotes.
It's not nice to the chickens to do that.
Be a responsible owner.
Keep them healthy and clean.
Feed them well.
Feed them non-GMO organic feed.
And you'll have really amazing healthy eggs for you or maybe your dogs.
If you have dogs, they'll love those eggs as well.
So, that's my advice.
Thank you for listening.
Mike Adams here, The Health Ranger, naturalnews.com.
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