I understand where you're coming from and struggle with the same issue myself. I guess it depends on whether the juvenile survival is low or zero. Maybe if they get enough help to become immune some epigenetics will kick in with subquent generations.. That's a long shot though.
I don't think you need to worry about in-breding depresion at this point. The gene pool is diverse enough to withstand it.
Getting better free-range survival is a tough one though. If they are being taken by predators then I think I'd just produce as many chicks as possible and floor the...
We have a wildish tomato like that. The fruit are about the diameter of a nickle. They only survive where there is something to climb up on to keep them off the ground. I doubt that the chickens get any because the more agile birds, rodents and those pesky humans take them as they mature.
For whatever reason, modern genetics don't seem to survive in our neighborhood and they die out. On the island of Kauai and in some other areas the layer genetics quickly become dominant. Our established feral flocks may have become adapted to deal with a pathogen or the mongoose or something.
I had some birds fighting through the side of a bird netting pen. One jumped up and lunged at the other feet first. His spur got caught in the netting and he was hanging there upside down when I found him. Embarrassed, but largely unharmed.
Another time one broke the sheath off one of his...
Wow. I didn't know a gamefowl could do that. That is almost exactly the weight gain you would expect from a laying hen of that age. The feed conversion ratio is probably quite a bit less than 3:1 too (weight gain per weight of feed. provided)..
I am skeptical about any wholistic natural medicinal product. If it was really effective then it would be widely known and the pharmacological world would not have bothered to synthesize a drug. To convince me requires some sort of proof.
I found that a fount waterer with some corid placed next to where a free-ranging hen with chicks comes to get a free hand-out will reduce chick mortality. But, it could be counter-productive because over the long term letting survival-of-the-fittest do it's work may be more beneficial. I don't...
I think it is phermones as well, and here's why.
We have small elevated breeding cages just big enough for a pair or trio of birds. Some of the cages are only a few feet away from each other. Birds in adjacent cages are in a look-but-not-touch situation An immature rooster will not mature...
A lot of different animals to that; even some fish and crustaceans. There does not need to be physical contact or competition over food for a dominant male to surpress development of a subordinate male. Then as soon as the dominant male is removed there is a race to see which subordinate male...