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Human predation (we ate some) and other predators accounted for the deaths in Catalonia. The Goshawk killed most. How many of the young who don't stay with the parents form new tribes do you think? I ended up with new tribes but I controled the breeding quantity by either not letting them sit...

This is basically what I got taught on my uncles farm when I was young. He believed it made for a fitter breed. He was also a great believer in cross breeds rather than heritage breeds when it came to keeping free range chickens in the UK. I think he would have chosen local, or land race breeds...

I would be interested in seeing your setup. You can get a rough idea of what I had from my coop page.

I'm going to talk to some chickens, but I'll be back.:D

And stop shouting please. :D

Well, yes I'm saying that as well because that is also true. In order to know whether a creature is deficient in any chemical one would need to take a blood sample much as one would with humans. Like humans, chickens can be deficient in certain chemicals and show no exterior signs of this. Most...

The point is they may not be getting the right quantity of amino acids, hence deficient. It doesn't mean they drop dead. If a chicken is deficient in protein for example it doesn't mean they don't get any. It can equally mean they don't get enough to achieve their full growth potential for example.

I took on the care of some Ex Battery hens last year. They'll live to three or four years old if they're lucky. Their overall health has improved drastically with a couple of hours a day out of their run, able to forage, fly, run and do many of the things free rangers can do. I'll try and find...

I didn't. I called it amino acid deficient. "Inadequate in amount or degree; insufficient."

:clap My view is based more around what is likely to be good for the chicken as a species in the long term and hatchery raised birds kept in cages is most defintely not.

I also used a long pole with a T piece on the end. If you apply pressure to the back of a chickens leg between the ankle and knee it's an involuntary action to step back and grasp whatever is behind them.

Free range chickens ime don't range far unless the population density pushes them out to thhe perimeters of where they were hatched and raised. Table scraps, water and housing in most case keep them within a reasonable range. Harvesting eggs can be a problem because one has to go and find the...

Where I live in Catalonia very few of the chickens people kept got fed commercial feed. Most seemed to live to ripe old age. What most did get was household scraps in addition to what they foraged. But, these were not the standard hatchery breeds I mainly see on these forums. Many were carefully...

I found that decaying trees produced an abundance of bugs but not as many as I would have thought appealed to chiickens. There was a beetle we called slaters that the chickens would eat if they could get them before the Muscovy ducks. Some of the bugs the chickens ate were tiny and I only...

Yes fair enough.:love

I have never suggested anything different. With some reluctance I'm going to put you on ignore. Yes, you've read a great deal on nutrition and some of what you write is relevant information. Unfortunately you don't know much about chickens it seems and while nutrition science is important one...

This is an excellent post and goes someway to illustrate just how important the type of chicken is when one is considering free ranging with minimum additional feed. It doesn't matter how many acres you have, chickens tend to establish territories and tend to stick to them. When tribe density...

I don't know which post you read... I have a suggestion for you. Instead of reading stuff on the internet go outside and look at what your chickens actually do. Let me see if I can straighten you out. It's not a theory. Lets start there. Chickens have survived for thousands of years without...

Lots of ideas about what to grow but what seems to be overlooked is how chickens forage. All the free rangers I've observed dig. The hens spread out and work their way over a patch of ground digging while the roosters stand guard. After they've dug, that's when they graze, eating the most tender...

Pasture raised, like many of the other terms used to describe the way chickens are kept seems to vary depending on country and interpretation. It's a bit like the term free range. This is a picture of a major egg product concern and these chickens are described as pasture raised. As you can...