{"id":3857,"date":"2013-07-27T16:35:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-27T08:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/?p=3857"},"modified":"2013-07-30T09:58:55","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T01:58:55","slug":"homeward-bound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/27\/homeward-bound\/","title":{"rendered":"Homeward Bound"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/2013025-006.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3850\" alt=\"2013025 006\" src=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/2013025-006-300x199.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/2013025-006-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/2013025-006.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>The chickens free range during the day eating grass, insects and our <a href=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/20\/haleotydeus-destructor\/\" target=\"_blank\">dreaded red-legged earth mites<\/a>\u00a0and duck under the <a href=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/25\/horse-proof-fence\/\">horse-proof fence<\/a> to head home at 4.30pm. \u00a0Locking up the birds at night gives them their best chance of survival. \u00a0I don&#8217;t understand how some keepers will leave them out all the time as they are so vulnerable. \u00a0We have &#8220;engineered&#8221; these birds to lay more, fly less and produce more meat and because they can&#8217;t fly they are easy pickings for predators. Their ancestors, the original &#8220;jungle fowl&#8221; do fly, not over great distances, but up into a tree to roost &#8211; unless they have young on the ground. \u00a0Our guinea fowl can fly which is why they live wild in the trees. We are not going to kill any of our girls when they pass their &#8220;usefulness&#8221; either. \u00a0These mature matrons will make good flock guardians keeping the other girls safe and keeping an eye out for eagles. \u00a0There has been quite a robust debate on the homesteading forums on killing birds when they stop laying as they are a waste of feed. \u00a0The discussion was sparked with the massive increase of &#8220;urban hipsters&#8221; abandoning their chickens to shelters or advertising them for sale either when they stop laying or when they find out that they take a bit of commitment to keep for the 8+ years they live for. \u00a0 I can understand why a commercial egg producer would kill birds as they only have the birds for one reason. \u00a0We have them for many reasons including eggs, pest management, <a href=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/16\/moulting-mama\/\">beauty<\/a>\u00a0and their individual and endearing <a href=\"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/18\/chicken\/\" target=\"_blank\">personalities<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The chickens free range during the day eating grass, insects and our dreaded red-legged earth mites\u00a0and duck under [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3850,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,10,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chickens","category-not-so-wildlife","category-property"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/2013025-006.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3857"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3976,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857\/revisions\/3976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cathmiller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}