I started raising poultry because I don't like how they are raised. Mine have a good life and hopefully a quick death. Fighting or hormonal boys make it easier. I used to sell the pullets because I haven't been able to dispatch a perfectly good girl.
I start with the assumption that every chicken is good to eat. The ones that are also good for laying eggs (hens) or breeding/eye-candy (some roosters) stay around longer before they get eaten.
I'm inconsistent in whether I name chickens or not. Ones with some distinctive feature tend to get names because that's easier than describing them every time I want to talk about them. Some of the names do resemble descriptions. (Snowy, Goldie, Maximus and Minimus for the bigger and smaller of two cockerels, Peanut for the smallest pullet in a particular group, and so forth.)
When I was young, my mom kept chickens. At first, every spring we bought a new batch of pullet chicks. Every fall when the new pullets started to lay and the older hens were expected to molt soon, we butchered the older hens. We were allowed to give them names and treat them as pets, but they still got butchered at the same age each time. At a later time, mom kept hens and a rooster. Each year she would hatch a new flock and butcher the older birds, along with butchering most of the young cockerels.
We lived in Alaska, so we had a sturdy snow-proof chicken house for the winter, and another pen that was only used in the summer. Each spring the older flock moved into the summer pen, and the sturdy chicken house was used to raise the new chicks. Butchering happened in the fall when it got too cold for chickens to live in the summer pen. The chicken house would only hold a certain number of chickens for the winter, so that was the limit on how many to keep. By replacing the whole flock, we never had to deal with integrating older & younger birds, and we never had to decide which hens were worth keeping for another year. My mom was interested in eggs and meat, not the individual chickens as pets, and this system worked very well for that purpose. It also got me used to the idea of eating every chicken at some point, rather than having some as pets that get to live longer. As an adult, of course I can do things differently, and sometimes I do, but I think those experiences had a big effect on what I expect when raising chickens.
I also need a rooster.
head.
