Got 6 baby chicks the other day ( Archived) (4)

Red S.e.x.l.i.n.k breed, sorry but I had to separate the letters to fool the site word filter like "D1ck". How absurd is that?
Anyway, 2 got a chill one night and died it happens! At least the fittest 4 survived and are doing quite well. Darwin at work.

These chicks are replacements for 4 full grown hens I just sold last week. The reason I sold those 4 hens is because they had their beaks trimmed by the 85 YO man I bought them from and didn't realize this until I got them home. Had I known this, I would not have bought them.

Ostensibly there is an old timey belief that you must cut the chickens beak to prevent cannibalism when the chickens are to be held in very crowded confinement such as commercial egg or meat production.
This is a myth that has its origin when factory farms began operating in the first half of the 19th century and has lasted more or less until today. Prior to that time, poultry were raised on family farms and were mostly allowed to roam around freely eating grass, bugs worms and anything else that was digestible, often including table scraps. The eggs and meat tasted a whole lot better then too. My hens happen to love Italian food.

My hens are all free range and I figured that my feed use would double when I doubled the size of my herd from 6 to 12. BTW if you're getting confused, 2 of the hens I bought from the old man had intact beaks, I kept those 2. Something I noticed early on was that while all the chickens with intact beaks were going around eating whatever the land would provide, the ones with the cut beaks would stand at the feeder eating all day. Normally I would put out a full feeder (1 quart) in the morning along with some day old bread I get from the bakery thrift store and about 2 cups of scratch feed. By noon the feeder would be empty and I would refill it and by the time they all went into the hen house for the night the feeder would again be empty. Thats 2 quarts or liters, per day. Now, after I sold the 4 hens with the cut beaks I put out a full feeder in the morning as usual, by noon it was still 1/2 full and by nighttime it was still 1/4 full. So by running the numbers I find that these 4 hens were consuming 1 1/2 quarts of feed per day. That's more than all the other 8.

Now I have a theory about the real purpose of inducing people into mutilating a chickens beak. It has nothing to do with cannibalism, it is so feed producers like Purina and Carnation etc, make more money by selling more feed!!! If a chicken can't forage, because it can no longer pick up anything off the ground, it will be forced to consume nothing but expensive factory produced chicken feed. I call it "Spoofed Capitalism". Increase prices by increasing demand by starting a little false rumor.

Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.
– Charlotte, the spider, to Wilbur, the pig. (Charlotte's Web – E. B. White)