[HN Gopher] Chickens in Trees
___________________________________________________________________
Chickens in Trees
Author : tancik
Score : 106 points
Date : 2024-05-25 23:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (suziepetryk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (suziepetryk.com)
| h2odragon wrote:
| The whole world is full of interesting things to see, new things
| to learn, if we just look.
|
| Humans are _gifted_ at ignoring the miracles that are happening
| right in front of them, everyday.
| interludead wrote:
| The world is indeed teeming with wonders and taking the time to
| notice them can bring joy and fulfillment in some ways.
| rdlw wrote:
| Cathedrals everywhere, for those with the eyes to see
| jmbwell wrote:
| I don't think there's an XKCD for this, but there is a Sesame
| Street:
|
| https://youtu.be/aCsY3REaADo?si=ODNcG3LvXNPxYSyQ
| dvh wrote:
| Chickens can also swim
| interludead wrote:
| Chickens are amazing creatures
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Do they favor the breast stroke?
| huppeldepup wrote:
| They also catch mice and swallow them whole. Jurassic Park
| style.
| smatija wrote:
| My mother's chickens once caught a snake, stampeded it to
| death and then promptly ate it. Dinosaurs for sure.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Interesting, do you have any sources or pictures?
| pvaldes wrote:
| I can confirm at least that on warm water they float as ducks,
| and seem to enjoy the experience greatly. I was too soaked to
| appreciate the swimming style.
|
| Hum, thinking about it, this is a great meme waiting to happen.
| All that you need is a warm Olympic swimming pool, to borrow
| some fatty velociclucktors and the cover of the night.
| Worldwide fame, here I go again...
| ritwikgupta wrote:
| Fascinating. The massive variance in the percentage of chickens
| that prefer roosting off the ground is interesting. I wonder what
| environmental pressures drives this decision.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Fox and maybe raccoon are the driving factors where I live. I
| have also seen cats going for younger smaller chickens. If the
| owner offers a safe shed which is closed up by night, there is
| no need for the chickens to rest in trees. They will
| voluntarily enter the shed in the evening.
| masswerk wrote:
| Don't miss the ending!
| pvaldes wrote:
| Well... of course. Those are jungle animals.
|
| Chickens roost in trees instinctively. Is a relatively safe place
| for those races that still can fly. Bantams either do it or look
| for a dense spiny shrub. Industrial races lack the confidence and
| are too heavy to jump safely without fracturing their hips.
| bagels wrote:
| Whether a chicken takes to trees is partly down to the breed.
| Bigger domesticated breeds are not suited to flying (due to their
| weight), but can jump up to 4-5 feet. Jungle foul and other
| smaller breeds can fly up in to trees to roost.
| dajtxx wrote:
| My chickens roost in a tree in the back yard. It's an easy tree
| for them to get into, they can walk/climb up from the ground a
| fair way then an easy flap to get to their preferred branches.
|
| In summer they disappear into the leaves, but in winter they're
| pretty obvious.
| culi wrote:
| The argon tree (as in the argon oil in your shampoos and soaps)
| is also known as the "goat tree". Please peruse these phenomenal
| photos of trees completely full of goats. Everyone of them looks
| like an album cover for some mid-00s indie band
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/tree-goats-of-morocco-argan...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=argon+goat&udm=2
| slow_typist wrote:
| I've seen both chickens and goats in trees in Germany. It
| occurs naturally if the owner doesn't care to much. Of course
| the goat will eat all the leaves and the tree will die
| eventually.
|
| I really like the pictures from Morroco though, thank you!
| Narishma wrote:
| It's argan, not argon. And the whole goat poop thing is just a
| urban legend guides like to repeat to naive tourists.
| culi wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. Not sure what myth you're talking
| about. Goats are one of the main seed dispersers at this
| point and overgrazing can even be a problem. Goats do also
| climb argan trees naturally for fruit, but I looked it up and
| there is an issue of herders purposefully trying to put many
| goats into a tree for tourists to take pictures. I'd imagine
| you wouldn't see a whole dozen of them in a tree like this if
| they're just grazing alone but they certainly can and do
| climb trees for fruit. Argan isn't even the only tree they're
| known to do this with
| Narishma wrote:
| The article you linked has a section about goats eating the
| argan fruit and pooping the nuts which are then supposedly
| collected to make argan oil. That's pure BS.
| goshx wrote:
| Down in Brazil, my grandfather used to shoot salt at the thieves
| climbing the trees to steal the chickens.
| tetris11 wrote:
| > shoot salt
|
| I feel you might need to expand here
| defrost wrote:
| Painful non lethal shotgun shell filling.
|
| Deters thieves without the flesh carnage of lead pellets |
| buckshot.
| itsanaccount wrote:
| and for some Appalachian wisdom fill em with coal dust and
| you mark em so you can find em later.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Social policing. :)
| ragazzina wrote:
| I wish there was a way to do this with food in a common
| fridge, in my office.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Related:
|
| "The proclivity of free-ranging indigenous village chickens for
| night-time roosting in trees" [1]
|
| [1]
| https://cabiagbio.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s43170-...
| tracker1 wrote:
| On population control... Are they generally considered safe to
| eat? That's the first thing I think of in this case...
| bagels wrote:
| The meat would probably be really tough. I'd think the only
| acceptable preparation would be braising or confit. They
| probably have a lot more parasites (worms) than you'd be used
| to as well.
| peterleiser wrote:
| I stayed in Kauai in 2012 and the locals said they do not eat
| the chickens. They said the meat is very tough and doesn't
| taste very good. They also said the chickens are useful
| because they eat millipedes, which are everywhere. They
| claimed that the sting from being bitten by one of those
| millipedes is unbelievably painful, and feels like a gun
| shot. I'm not sure about the gun shot part, but everyone
| seemed pretty serious about how painful it feels.
| trealira wrote:
| There's an ant called the bullet ant, so named because its
| sting feels like getting shot. Its Wikipedia page shows
| other similar nicknames in Spanish and in Portuguese. So,
| given that other bugs' stings have already been described
| as comparable to getting shot, I believe it when you say
| that they say the millipede's bite feels equally painful.
|
| Its Wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraponera_clavata
| nradov wrote:
| The localsn in Maui have a recipe for cooking the feral
| chickens there. Put the chicken in a pot. Add a lava rock.
| Fill with water. Boil until the rock is soft.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Have laying chickens that free-range, and have eaten a couple
| of incidental and aggressive roosters. They are immensely
| tougher than the typical grocery store Cornish Crosses. Soup or
| braising is highly recommended. Coq au vin recipes meant for
| store-bought chicken (nearly all of them) will need to be
| adjusted back to add the required cooking time to make the meat
| tender. Plan on several to six hours of cooking.
|
| None of the hens have aged out of laying thanks to the efforts
| of the local predators. Should that ever happen, it will surely
| require resolving the question of whether the hens are
| livestock or pets before I can tell you about how the cooking
| process varies from a grocery store bird.
| emacsen wrote:
| Now I have that darn Sesame Street song stuck in my head.
|
| There are chickens in the trees
|
| There are chickens in the trees
|
| Won't you listen to me please
|
| There are chickens in the trees
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCsY3REaADo
| tetris11 wrote:
| _Cities in Flight_ is what immediately sprang to my mind
| keiferski wrote:
| By the title, I thought this was going to be about the theorized
| future of meat production as a kind of fruit, i. e., "chicken
| flesh growing on trees," and the ethical questions surrounding
| that idea and the positivist worldview that leads to it being
| considered ethical, and if it is actually a good thing or not.
|
| It would be an ironic (and sad?) thing if the human history of
| the chicken began in trees and ended in trees.
| floren wrote:
| Mark Twain wrote some humorous bits about how chickens may be
| enticed out of a neighbor's tree by sliding a warm board under
| their feet. They'll step on happily, and can then be conveyed to
| a convenient sack en route to the kitchen.
| resolutebat wrote:
| The domesticated chicken (Gallus domesticus) is a "curated"
| version of the Red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) which lives wild in
| the tropics, can fly short distances and is still entirely
| capable of breeding with chickens. The parks of Singapore are
| full of the things, and it's not unusual to see one strutting
| past the chicken rice stall at a hawker center, clucking at its
| unfortunate relatives that have been poached and strung up by
| their feet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl
| ggm wrote:
| Interesting timing: rogue chickens in the UK causing mayhem to
| locals because 200 chooks in the woods is ... noisy.
| tomcam wrote:
| I made the mistake of buying chickens as livestock. I fell in
| love with the day-old chicks the moment we got into the car to
| take them home. Plan was that 1/3 would become food, 1/3 would
| die of disease, and the remainder would lay eggs. Unfortunately I
| lost my taste for chicken. We lost 1/3 due to predators, not
| disease, despite building a $20,000 chicken run. I was depressed
| for months. And I have been through some heinous shit in my long
| life.
|
| They make lovely sounds and they live next to my office so
| working at home is delightful. They are endlessly silly. They are
| manipulative. They are dignified and stupid. Their plumage is a
| miracle of biology. They aren't particularly friendly. I have no
| clue why I adore them.
|
| Had no idea that such stupid little dinosaurs would change my
| life so dramatically.
| globular-toast wrote:
| A lot more people would be veggie if they had to kill the
| animals themselves. You just wouldn't do it unless you were
| really hungry, which I doubt anyone on this forum has
| experienced even once.
| margor wrote:
| Sorry to break your bubble, but this is how people normally
| live on countrysides / small villages, at least in my
| country. Killing livestock animals is everyday thing and no
| one bats an eye.
|
| Hell, even killing new born kittens / puppies is considered
| by some normal thing, if they breed uncontrolled (even if
| they could just... castrate / neuter them [not sure which is
| the right word for it, I'm not native]).
|
| After all how is it different from a full grown chicken,
| other than the fact you don't normally eat cats/dogs?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Why would any of that refute "a lot more would be
| vegetarian"?
| yurishimo wrote:
| Because there are plenty of people who don't kill/eat
| certain animals but do slaughter other animals. This
| person in the thread described their new love for
| chickens, but I have a good feeling that they probably
| still eat beef or pork. But the "solution" to the vegan
| problem cannot be to surround everyone with farm animals,
| because when that was true for most people (100+ years
| ago), everyone ate meat that they killed themselves.
|
| I think any good person can understand and empathize with
| the modern day practices of factory farming and meat
| production, but the solutions coming from vegans are also
| untenable in the face of human history. We can move away
| from unethical farming practices without removing meat
| from our diets and ignoring the absolutely huge benefits
| of eating meat as humans.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Well, from a philosophical point of view, vegetarian
| movement is unfair for the plants
|
| Plants that are responsible of lots and lots of human
| well-being and as life beings deserve to be treated with
| a similar respect that we use with other organisms.
|
| Incidentally is also bad for human health
|
| Yes, it is. Those articles that claim that you can live
| on a strict vegetarian diet without any bad consequences
| for your health are either lying, incomplete or based in
| pseudoscience. Is basically a religious movement.
| crashmat wrote:
| I have grown up on a purely vegetarian diet since I was
| born and I don't have any health problems from that. I
| know anecdotal evidence is usually not great and I will
| admit it is harder to maintain a healthy diet whilst
| vegetarian (but not too much), in this case it surely
| cannot be true that you can't live on a vegetarian diet
| without any bad consequences if I have done that?
| margor wrote:
| Because killing farm animals is considered a norm in
| almost all places who had done that since generations.
|
| If you would be surrounded by chickens, livestock and
| other farm animals and watching them getting butchered
| was your daily bread as a child, why would you reconsider
| when you would grow up? It literally put food on your
| table, and besides home grown farm animals taste A LOT
| better (speaking from experience, but never grown them
| myself, any meat product I buy from the Walmart alikes
| tastes much worse).
|
| Its only when you never witnessed death of any kind that
| you become so sensitive to it. Once it becomes normal (of
| course, I talk about farm animals here only) it's really
| hard to see advocates for vegetarianism as some sort of
| zealots.
|
| And personally? What's the difference if they die of
| natural causes vs. just butchering them when the time is
| right? If you raised them ethically and they were
| generally happy, then for these animals its just... How
| it would end anyway? If you compare that to industrial
| farming, and if it was the only way to get meat sure I
| would consider being vege instead, its horrible how they
| are kept and treated. But for my own raised animals? Its
| a cycle of life.
| globular-toast wrote:
| People keep saying it's normal etc but then you'll notice
| everywhere it's always the poor people who end up doing
| the slaughtering while rich people get to pretend it
| doesn't happen.
|
| I'm not sure that being desensitised is a good argument.
| People can become desensitised to a lot of things, like
| slavery or other abuse. That doesn't make it ok.
|
| The difference is factory farming really. I don't think
| eating meat is wrong, per se. (But I do think a lot of
| people wouldn't miss meat if they tried it, especially
| the only eats chicken breast type). But factory farming
| is disgusting.
| margor wrote:
| Fully agreed on factory farming. Not only is it cruel and
| unethical, but the quality is also much worse making
| vegetables actually a pretty good alternative.
|
| On that note, let me tell you how home grown vegetables
| are also a lot better than... ;)
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've been in such communities and they do bat an eye
| actually. If people enjoyed it then rich western people
| would be doing it for fun. Funny that I don't see the "kill
| your own goat" experience being sold in tourist packages.
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| Hobby farming tourism is definitely a thing. Many well
| earning organizations host immersive events that include
| butchering classes.
|
| Joel Salatin. Farmstead Meatsmith. Justin Rhodes. Etc.
|
| I guess it depends on your definition of fun but rarely
| are people learning as an immediate need for survival.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Butchery != slaughter. And not many of those tourists can
| handle pig face, for example (I'm sure some of them force
| themselves to go through with it).
| hulitu wrote:
| > Funny that I don't see the "kill your own goat"
| experience being sold in tourist packages.
|
| Some goats can kill you.
| margor wrote:
| I think there is a shade of grey between enjoying it and
| never doing because animals are another living being that
| don't deserve it.
|
| If you are doing it as part of putting a good tasting
| food on the table, I would say no, no one bats an eye,
| but I suppose they don't enjoy the process too - it's
| messy process and requiers some safety considerations too
| like making sure your meat doesn't have any parasites.
| alt227 wrote:
| Have you seen the 'Kill a cow with a grenade launcher'
| packages which are popular with stag parties in Eastern
| Europe?
| globular-toast wrote:
| No, but I'm well aware disgusting people exist. People
| abuse other people, but we generally agree this isn't a
| good thing. Also, pulling a trigger from afar isn't the
| same thing. I also wonder how many of those "real men"
| lose sleep after the experience. Emperor's new clothes
| comes to mind.
| alt227 wrote:
| You seem incredibly closed to the fact that lots of very
| normal and kind people are fine with killing animals for
| food without issue. I assure you, there are many millions
| of them around the world.
| alt227 wrote:
| Yep fully agree. I live in a small village near a country
| estate and lots of the people here kill and pluck their own
| foul, including myself. The ones that dont, have no issue
| with it.
|
| When there is a shoot on the estate we request some of the
| birds and then through the season we regularly come home
| from work to find braces of dead pheasants hanging on our
| front door. We pluck them and then roast or make stews out
| of them and they are delicious.
|
| It is common to walk through the village after a shoot and
| see dead birds hanging from most of the doors. Nobody
| complains or thinks it is strange, in fact everybody looks
| forward to the free meat!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Not even 3 generations ago, it was incredibly common for
| people to slaughter their own farm animals. My grandmother
| was an old farm woman, raised in the time before
| refrigeration. She'd slaughter and pluck her own chickens
| without a second thought. It's entirely a modern phenomenon
| of global distribution and modern conditioning that lead you
| to that conclusion. Some animals evolved to be prey, and that
| is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are
| among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so
| their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an
| adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that
| predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems.
|
| You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know
| many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who
| like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own
| catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they
| have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among
| those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their
| numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an
| adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that
| predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems._
|
| Red junglefowl, the ancestors to domesticated chickens,
| only lay a few clutches annually for a total of less than
| 20 eggs per year. Modern chickens that lay hundreds of eggs
| a year are a product of selective breeding, not some
| natural adaptation.
| ndr wrote:
| One could argue that is natural adaptation. Modern
| chickens are likely going to be more successful at
| propagating their genes into the future.
| ben_w wrote:
| Only if you want to argue about what counts as "natural".
| Lutger wrote:
| I see the case for it, but what wouldn't be natural once
| you allow this? Gene editing? Why not?
|
| A consequence is that 'natural' will lose all meaning. If
| everything is natural, then nothing is, really.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I fall under the idea that yes, everything is natural, we
| are not special no matter what secrets of the universe we
| uncover and wield . Even our robot descendants , if they
| ever come to be, are natural too. Just because we have
| the ability to acknowledge material selection does not
| mean we are except from it
| throwup238 wrote:
| That's a gross misuse of language that makes words
| utterly meaningless. When people say "artificial
| selection" they don't mean a supernatural deity is doing
| it.
|
| It's like going "haha gotcha! tomatoes are fruit, not
| vegetables!", completely missing the difference between
| the use of the word in a culinary versus botanical
| context. It's not insightful or useful in any way, it's
| just equivocation.
| thfuran wrote:
| Only if by natural you mean "not supernatural".
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yeah, I used to perform similar mental gymnastics too.
| Interestingly, it's very similar to the behaviour of
| addicts. Unfortunately, the way poor people lived 3
| generations ago has absolutely nothing to do with how fat,
| rich people live today. What's next? No vaccines? No
| pasteurisation? This line of reasoning is a very slippery
| slope.
|
| Hunting is different for a couple of reasons. First, you're
| almost certainly talking about killing from a distance with
| a gun. But it's also quite different to hunt a wild animal
| rather than raise a domestic animal just to kill it. But
| also some "hunting" is basically a simulation using
| released domestic animals (see pheasant shooting in the
| UK). And some is just downright cruel (see fox hunting in
| the UK or shooting of birds in Malta). Nobody is doing the
| slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing
| the dirty work. Funny that.
| alt227 wrote:
| > Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's
| always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.
|
| But also to provide. The estate near us has shoots every
| season and the fowl which is killed is given to the local
| residents. Lots of local poorer people really look
| forward to shoot season because they can pack their
| freezer with lots of free meat. I speak to lots of older
| folks in the area and they say this is the way it has
| been done for hundreds of years.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny
| that.
|
| Someone has to skin & butcher the animal though, or does
| that "just happen?"
| adrianN wrote:
| Three generations ago it was also common to beat your
| children. I'm not sure that we should base moral arguments
| on what was common in the past.
| bbarnett wrote:
| No, it was not. It was common to spank your children, out
| of care and love, when they did things dangerous to
| themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch
| when something truly horrific was done.
|
| We now view this as wrong, but that wasn't _beating_
| them.
|
| Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their
| children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was _common_.
| revert_to_test wrote:
| From what I observe, although spanking is described as
| basically harmless, not everyone who lived through it see
| it as something that improved their lives. Even if it was
| administered by well-meaning, loving parents.
| bbarnett wrote:
| To be clear, as this is often required on HN, I was
| speaking of a subset of spanking:
|
| _out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to
| themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch
| when something truly horrific was done._
|
| In other words, _never_ because fed up / angry. Never
| because of minor situations, and so on. For example,
| swearing isn't "dangerous to themselves or others".
| Spanking employed when the _life of the child_ or others
| is involved, is a short-cut to locking an intense memory
| into long-term recall.
|
| This sort of event is rare.
|
| And to be frank? "Improved their lives" isn't necessarily
| important. Note how I state "dangerous to themselves _or
| others_ "? Siblings and other children have to be taken
| into account.
|
| Lastly, and take this from someone with grey hair, it
| wasn't until my 30s that I started to appreciate some of
| the discipline I disagreed with as a child. Disagreeing,
| doesn't mean it was wrong.
| lukan wrote:
| "Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their
| children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common."
|
| In the areas that still do beat their children, they
| commonly do beat more, when they are angry.
| adrianN wrote:
| Okay, I believe my argument is not hurt by replacing the
| word ,,beat" with ,,spank". Adding that physical
| punishment was done out of love strengthens my argument,
| I think.
| ars wrote:
| The change is spanking is not because spanking is harmful
| but because the world doesn't need it. The environment
| people are in is much more gentle, so it's not necessary
| to raise children that can handle large amounts of
| adversity.
|
| We also don't teach our kids to defend themselves against
| sword attacks, for the same reason - it's no longer
| necessary.
|
| Your argument implies that the past behavior was bad and
| we should change it, but that's incorrect. The past
| behavior was correct for its time. If someone would have
| raised a child without spanking 100 years ago they would
| end up with a weak person who could not live in the real
| world, this would be a bad thing.
| najra wrote:
| I read parent's comments more as a counter argument to
| the suggestion more people would be vegetarian if they
| had to kill their own animals for food, not a moral
| justification based on "people used to do it".
| Lutger wrote:
| I read it as both, especially given the "I'm a hunter and
| hunting is great" bit. It is moral psychology. There is
| an implicit notion of what it means to be a human, and
| what is ethically sound is tied up with it, because it is
| universal, beyond time and place, and thus normal and
| good.
|
| In this particular ethical issue it is an eternal tug-of-
| war between humans as essentially vegans by nature,
| corrupted by cloaking animal suffering in neat, pre-
| slaughtered packages (if we would only see...), and the
| other side presenting humans as one of the animals eating
| other animals. We are made out to be part of a natural
| order as hunter and butcher, which is both normal and
| good. Modern sensibilities around animal suffering is
| seen as a whimsy aberration of normality, artificial and
| unnatural. It is both descriptive and normative, and the
| what-is functions as a tool for the what-should.
|
| This does lead to pretty bad 'science' (on both sides,
| really) and conversations that are very loaded around
| basic facts. I would agree if you would say the what-is
| does not depend on the what-should-be and vice versa,
| free will and all, but this is often not how ethical
| conversations (and rhetoric) works.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| Just think of how much the environment would benefit if we
| wouldn't need to run so many refrigerators to eat fresh
| food...
| ars wrote:
| It would not benefit at all. Zero. It would harm the
| environment because all the food waste outweighs the
| energy cost of refrigerators by several orders of
| magnitude.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| Feed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms.
| Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm
| waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to
| sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that
| recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground
| and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.
| ars wrote:
| It's better to eat the "food waste", rather than create
| more waste in the first place.
|
| If I have leftover rice, I'd rather refrigerate it and
| eat it tomorrow, instead of feed it to chickens.
|
| Rabbits can not eat food waste, they have very sensitive
| digestions. Very few fish will eat food waste (mostly
| just tilapia will do so).
|
| > feed bacteria and worm waste to plants
|
| Plants do not eat bacteria. You can't just "feed" worm
| waste to plants, you would have to bury into the soil via
| plowing or some other method.
|
| Bacteria also make CO2 by digesting food. The fertilizer
| they make is minerals and nitrogen.
|
| You have a bit of a simplistic view of how this food
| cycle works.
|
| > I was always taught that recycling was good, while
| pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is
| bad, but I'm no expert.
|
| It's not so simple. Except for metal, recycling usually
| uses more oil than not recycling.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The sibling comments to this are truthful, we wouldn't be
| vegetarians but I think we would be eating more vegetables.
| When I was vegetarian in my youth I visited my grandparents
| in the country and asked them about killing animals
| themselves. They did have relationships with their animals
| and didn't enjoy doing it but its what they did. I think if
| you ask modern animal farmers today they would say they do
| not enjoy killing their animals. My ancestors did say that
| they ate more preserved (salted) meat and vegetables more but
| they had more meat in later times. The animals they raised
| were for occasional or special times not daily consumption.
|
| This is reflected by a thousand years or so for most of the
| West with significant parts the calendar where there was
| abstinence from meat which for many now people would consider
| impossible. At most we would be periodic vegetarians,
| omnivores with the balance towards the vegetarian.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I think you are closer to the mark. People don't seem to
| realise they didn't eat meat as much back then. Like not
| even 10% what people eat now. To sustain the amount of meat
| consumption today they would have been killing every single
| day! In fact, it was common for families to have one pig
| which they'd kill around Christmas time. The pig was fed
| waste food (leftovers, vegetable peelings etc). They ate
| the entire pig, including the blood. Not a scrap would be
| wasted.
|
| But I think you are also forgetting that agriculture has
| improved since and people aren't hungry any more. We don't
| need to keep a pig and feed it swill. There's so much to go
| around that many people are fat. It's 100% a choice to eat
| meat today and if that choice involved doing the killing I
| don't think many would make it.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > they would have been killing every single day!
|
| Wut? A quarter of a steer provided my family of 3 with
| beef for an entire year. A _quarter!_
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yeah but you didn't only eat beef, and people choose the
| same cuts over and over (like chicken breast).
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > The animals they raised were for occasional or special
| times not daily consumption
|
| My mother was one of 14 kids growing up on a small farm in
| the West of Ireland in the mid-20th century. They ate meat
| (mostly bacon, home-killed and salted) cooked on an open
| fire 6 days a week, except during Lent
| tomcam wrote:
| I did in fact go vegetarian after killing animals as a kid. I
| could do it now because I have a family.
| _heimdall wrote:
| We processed and butchered our first two pigs earlier this
| year. Its not for the feint of heart, but I wouldn't trade
| the experience for anything.
|
| We raised them from a few months old (we took them from a
| farm that was having to close) and did the entire processing
| and butchering process ourselves. The meat is night and day
| better than what you can buy in a store, the bacon is
| delicious, and we know the animal lived an excellent life and
| had a near instant end.
| globular-toast wrote:
| "Processed". Did you personally see their "near instant
| end"?
|
| There is a very humane way to kill mammals actually: inert
| gas asphyxiation. A pig will happily enter a chamber full
| of nitrogen and die peacefully. If you arranged that then
| it's commendable. Personally meat is nowhere near important
| enough to me to go to such lengths, though.
| NikkiA wrote:
| I killed my first chicken when I was ~9 I think, maybe 10 at
| a push, my dad handed me the axe and said 'have fun'.
|
| Still eat meat.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| That is an incredibly naive statement. Most people I know can
| kill and butcher deer, fish, birds, etc. 99.9% of the country
| isn't San Francisco.
| jen729w wrote:
| Yeah! We got a couple of backyard chooks and thought it'd be
| eggs all the way.
|
| Three years later, and we're taking Belinda 'the bruiser' to
| the vet tomorrow for her second hormone implant. Turns out the
| ISA Browns that are bred to lay have their insides just
| _destroyed_ by the constant production.
|
| So you can let them die, or you can spend thousands of dollars
| keeping them alive. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I had no idea I'd love chickens this much. They're tremendous
| animals.
| tomcam wrote:
| WHAT IS WRONG WIH US
| pvaldes wrote:
| Losing chicken to predators is normal and according to plan.
| Fortunately they can be multiplied really fast so... If the fox
| cubs had a good dinner once on a blue moon is not the end of
| the world or something to be depressed about it.
| tomcam wrote:
| I know that in my head.
| oooyay wrote:
| A $20k run?! Please tell me about this. My run and coop are
| maybe $1k total.
| tbyehl wrote:
| Are you not on any chicken social media groups? If you're
| paying someone else to build something with, uh, curb appeal
| -- fully painted, metal roof, nice hardware -- $20k is real
| easy.
| oooyay wrote:
| Ah, I'm not social media apart from forums. I do watch a
| lot of coop and run builds on YouTube though. With that
| inspiration I bought a bunch of tools and am in the process
| of revamping my stuff to fit more with our house. It has
| the added benefit of making the chickens more a part of our
| little microecosystem as well since much of it is geared
| towards collecting their waste and pine flakes to make into
| compost. Even with all the tools added in I'm probably only
| at $2-3k.
| tomcam wrote:
| I didn't trust myself so I hired an awesome dude who did a
| great job.
|
| Two years later we learned mountain lions are bigger and
| stronger than expected.
| lrvick wrote:
| If anyone is ever in Florida, stop by Oviedo which is home to a
| colony of feral chickens that sleep in the trees of the town
| shopping center parking lot and are found eating scraps daily at
| the local KFC drive through.
|
| There is a mini documentary out there on said chickens. They are
| kind of the town mascots.
| bbarnett wrote:
| One case of mad chicken disease coming up, although chickens
| don't really need their head.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/running-ponies/meet-...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember in Morocco, they had tree-climbing goats. You'd be
| driving down the highway, and pass a bunch of trees, dripping
| with goats, and the goatherd, sitting nearby, looking bored.
| vertnerd wrote:
| We keep chickens, but I rarely find them in trees. We also keep a
| heritage breed of turkey, the Royal Palm, and those guys love to
| sleep in the trees.
|
| If you ever decide to start keeping chickens or turkeys, you will
| discover that most of the things you thought you knew about birds
| are wrong. They are fascinating creatures.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm extraordinarily disappointed that Doug Zongker's seminal work
| in the field was not mentioned or cited:
|
| <https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf>
|
| Previously on HN:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35745880>
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830497>
|
| And a dang compilation from 2023:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35746402>
|
| Video: <http://yewtu.be/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk>
| familiartime wrote:
| Author here (of the blog post, not of the literary beauty you
| linked). This is amazing. I'll add a mention.
| smeej wrote:
| > ...casting nervous glances at a rooster slowly approaching me
| like a Weeping Angel.
|
| > Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They [the
| Weeping Angels] are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn
| your back. Don't turn away. And most of all, don't blink.
|
| I know this has nothing to do with the point of the article, but
| Weeping Angels are exactly the wrong analogy for something
| approaching slowly!
| crashmat wrote:
| I think the comparison was more based on the rooster
| approaching when they werent looking and stopping when they
| were. I can't recall any other monsters that do that.
| familiartime wrote:
| Indeed, this is the part of the behavior I was referring to
| :) It's a good point about the speed though - not the perfect
| analogy.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Related: a flock of 100 feral chickens living in the woods is
| "tormenting" a village in the UK:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/26/out-...
| totetsu wrote:
| If you want the tree roosting experience at home
| https://www.iozon.co.jp/english/c-couch/
| aj_icracked wrote:
| Awww I love seeing chicken lovers on HN threads! I started a
| company called Coop specifically to make it much easier and
| accessible for anyone with a backyard to raise chickens. We make
| cameras that do a bunch of computer vision work for predator
| detection, door alerts, egg alerts, etc. We're at the point where
| we can now notify people that, "hey, raccoon is detected, door is
| closed and all chickens are safe". It's been a super fun company
| to build and right now 59% of our customers have never raised
| chickens before. I've always wanted to blend backyard agriculture
| with smart home technology and it seems to be working. Keep up
| the chicken-love!! Our website is www.coop.farm if anyone is
| interested or has feedback!
| hiatus wrote:
| Looked interesting until I saw that there's a monthly fee.
|
| > Just like your own flock, we need to feed ours in order to
| get eggs. That's why our membership is required to unlock the
| full intelligence of your coop.
| becomevocal wrote:
| Very cool product! We got into chickens a few years ago and
| it's taken over our life in a good way. Sounds like we're in a
| similar boat as tomcam :)
|
| I remember the first time my wife saw your coop, she said "that
| is what I wanted to build", so you probably have some product
| market fit going on. We had already built our run at that time,
| however now she thinks a good supplemental product idea is a
| feeder with a camera. Like Petcube combined with the Grandpa's
| Feeders product. She would definitely be up to chat about her
| chicken keeping needs and all the ideas that come with it. Her
| details are on her blog: tropicalchicki.com
|
| _Note for other HN peeps: If you really like cats and nature
| you probably will like chicken keeping! They have lots of
| personality and communicate in more ways than we are typically
| taught._
|
| On the article, I wonder if people commonly see their first
| chickens in trees on islands. It's a common thing in PR, which
| also has a lot of wild chickens roaming. Vieques, the smaller
| sister island off the east coast of PR, kind of celebrates
| this. Lots of chicken murals, themed gifts, names of beaches,
| etc
| bloomingeek wrote:
| What little experience I have is this: If a coop or other
| protective area isn't available at night, chickens will roost in
| a tree until daylight. (their vision is very poor in the dark, so
| running to escape isn't a real option at night.) The problem with
| tree roosting at night is owls or other night predators. The owls
| will position on the trunk side of the limb and side-walk the
| chicken towards the end of the limb until they fall to the
| ground, and then well, you know.
|
| A friend of mine always checks his small flock just before dark
| for escapees from the coop. If the count is off, he always looks
| in the near-by trees.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > did the cats eat the chickens and take their place
|
| Maybe not the adults, who are big enough to be a challenge, but
| almost certainly the chicks.
|
| A friend of mine who lives on a farm was trying to get ducks to
| live on his pond. He was advised to shoot all the feral cats he
| could find, which he did. He still has something of a problem
| with snapping turtles nabbing the ducklings as they swim, but
| he's working on that too.
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