All Pets Web – Not Just Dogs n Cats

The perfect pet for adults and children is chickens. They are lots of fun to have around, clean up nasty bugs in the garden and give you lots of wonderful free range eggs to eat.

The keeping of chickens is not just restricted to country folk. Many suburban dwellers keep chickens and delight from those wonderful free range eggs.

Of course you need to check out the rules and regulations from your local council to see what you are and are not allowed to do when it comes to keeping chickens. For instance many councils don’t allow the keeping of roosters in built-up areas because of the early morning noise, and also have in some instances regulations about how many hens you can have and about the building and positioning of chicken houses.

But after you’ve found out what you can and cannot do there are no other reasons why dwellers of suburbia are unable to keep backyard chickens in suburbia.

There are a few common questions that I get asked regularly, in particular how many chickens should I have, and what type of chickens to buy.

There is a rough rule of thumb that a chicken will lay around 300 eggs in a year, laying more per week in summer than winter.

You can then look at how many eggs you require to determine how many chooks to keep.

But it’s extremely rare that you should have eggs going to waste. If you do simply ask the neighbours, they will fall all over themselves to buy your free range eggs.

However as a general rule as an answer to the question of how many chickens to have, if you have 3 or 4 hens that would be sufficient for the average family.

And the breed of chickens that you choose depends on why you want chickens. Are you buying them for their looks or for their eggs?

Our children love fancy looking chickens and so we are the proud owners of some pure white silky bantams. Whilst they look wonderful and are fun to have around they lay small eggs, and not as many as some other breeds, and so are really only there for looks.

They look wonderful.

For egg laying we tend to select Isa Browns. These are a good chook for laying plenty of eggs, though one drawback of Isa Browns is that they rarely sit on eggs, so if you want chicks each year Isa Browns may not deliver. Their lack of enthusiasm for sitting on eggs is the reason they are good layers, because once they start to sit on eggs they stop laying.

If you have chicks it’s just wonderful and the kids love it. But the downside is that you will have to find something to do with those roosters, and unless you want to find that your small brood of 3 or 4 hens grows to 10 or 15 you will also have to find something to do with the hens.

However these are small problems when compared to the delights of keeping chickens as pets, and also of having those wonderful, tasty and fresh free range eggs to eat every day.

Peter’s website is at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au