Some chicken drama has happened. So, I posted (or I think Notabitail posted it for me) about how my friend and I bought four show chickens from Meyer Hatchery. They grew up great! The two d’Uccles are AMAZING, and the two Polish were great. Well, my FFA advisor has been ticking me off with the chickens, because she doesn’t give a crap about them.
She made us move the chicks outside when they were three weeks old, and now that they are three months old, they are still in the tiny coop we moved them into because we have no where else to put them. Now, my friend and I know very well that the space they are in is too small, and we’ve been talking about buying or building a new coop for a while, we just haven’t done it yet.
I might want to mention that their tiny coop is in a much larger run that has another small coop for three adult chickens, but the three chooks have free roam of the run, while my four chicks are stuck in a tiny coop that one full grown chicken would be crammed into.
So, there’s a RIR rooster, a RIR hen, and then what I think is an EE hen, but I’m not sure. The rooster is a jerk, but the two hens are somewhat sweet.
Well, the doors on the small coop are flimsy and don’t lock very well, so there’s been times where our chicks have gotten out, but we’ve always been able to get them back in their coop with no deaths.
Well, Thanksgiving, my friend texted me and said that her polish pullet got out and was killed and eaten by the big chickens. Obviously I was furious and sad, and I can’t even imagine what she felt.
Well, we talked for a while and decided that we were going to actually build a new coop and make sure that we get our chicks away from our ag teachers chickens. My friend texted our teacher, by the way, told her what happened, and got no response.
The big chickens are at school to lay eggs (which they have never laid eggs, and are full grown, so there’s no point in them being there), so my friend and I decided to buy some new chicks that will lay a good amount of eggs a year, and we were planning on asking our ag teacher to bring her cannibalistic chickens back to her house.
So, come today, we are back at school. We talk to a different ag teacher (who is a huge animal person) and she agrees with us completely and says that she will ask the other ag teacher to remove her chickens. The ag teacher immediately shuts her down and says “it’s just a chicken, why does it matter?”
That obviously rubbed my friend and I the wrong way, and also the animal lover ag teacher, so she’s helping us with a few things. She said that she is going to talk to someone in charge of school programs and see if they will buy us a little coop to keep our three remaining chicks in, until we can build a big chicken coop that will hold 12 chickens. If the school won’t buy us a coop, she said that she’ll bring her old duck coop over to the school for us, but I don’t really want her to.
So, this is why I am posting… does anyone have any plans or any tips for how to build a chicken coop (with an attached run) that can hold 12 chickens… I think it should be around 98 square feet, from what I’ve seen for proper space for each chicken, but I might be wrong.
I’ve found a few designs that I like, but I’ll honestly go with anything secure that’ll keep them safe and happy. We have a space picked out for the coop, but we just need the materials and we need to build it. So any plans, tips, or ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Hope everyone is doing well.
I know about the taxes but I didn't know about the beady eyes rule. Truly sorry but here's another set of eyes, what I like to call a void. A black void.
I love her colouring, both of them are lovely girls, you chose two lovely chickies 
