Do your hens need a pin-up calendar of sexy roosters?
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
No, it is not April 1st and it is no joke. Some researcher have suggested that flocks of hens where there is no cockerel (rooster) do better if they have a picture of a nice strutting rooster pinned up on the wall of the coop. Really?
Well yes, they have suggested is and obviously some entrepreneurial spirit has now also gone and produced such a calendar and is trying to convince everyone that hens will be calmer and produce better when they have a picture of a rooster to look at.
As someone said people will believe (almost) anything as long as it is said that scientists have discovered this or that. Call me a cynic but I do not think that your hens or mine do need a rooster or a pinup calendar with rooter pictures. And, how would they turn the pages?
Flocks of hens have roamed our farmyards and backyards for centuries if not millennia with or without rooster and no one so far has needed to put up any pictures of a rooster in the coop.
However, with hen keeping having become rather fashionable in the last decade or so people are trying to cash in on this phenomenon whether by means of rather expensive fancy coops or now by producing a pinup calendar for the feathered girls. What next?
While some of the manufactured chicken coops are real good others are just too fancy and too expensive. The only plastic coops, for instance, and plastic material for the building is better than wood as it will reduce mite infestation and allows for easier cleaning, are those made by Solway Recycling in the UK. Made from so-called Agri-Board, which is recycled plastic boards made from plastic farm waste, such as those plastic wraps for hay and silage, and they also make other great products from that material for the farmer, smallholder, homesteader and gardener.
I succumbed a while back to buy one of those for my hens as the wooden shack that they occupied previously got infested and re-infested by mites time and again and also because it was falling apart.
Despite that I lost, over time, and some had been lost before, my original flock and acquired some point of lay hens who seem to be quite happy with that home of theirs. But I digressed.
I find it ludicrous to think that my hens, or yours for that matter, would need a pinup calendar with pictures of roosters. However, cross-shredded waste paper makes for good bedding (litter) and old calendars can be used for that as well.
© 2013
