Keeping Livestock

Livestock can be very rewarding whether you plan to rear them for meat or not. Chickens are good to start out with as they are relatively easy to keep and don't take up huge amounts of time or energy. There are a huge variety of breeds available and also ex-battery hens that are looking for new homes.

Again there are books to help you learn how to care for chickens and while many people buy them as fluffy one day old chicks they don't realise that it will be months before they start laying eggs and that if not sexed correctly their cute chicks could all turn out to be cockerels! Sexing chicks is not something for the novice to do although there are a couple of methods widely used.

Chick sexing made easy, A guide to sexing chicks, are a couple of books you could try. Myself I prefer to breed my own birds and then cull any unwanted cockerels before they become a problem. Laying hens can object to more than one cockerel and egg production can drop, plus fully matured cockerels will fight and often injure one another while trying to establish dominancy within a flock.