• ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    10 hours ago

    Fuck roosters.

    It is an utter mystery to me that after how many millennia of raising chickens that somebody hasn’t bred a mute rooster.

    • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      My guess is “places that have lots of predators and don’t want them being attracted to residential areas”. I can see an argument for banning chickens in a suburb if, say, little Susie down the street got attacked by a hungry coyote that couldn’t make it into any of the coops (i have no clue if coyotes would attack a kid or not, just an example).

    • neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      14·
      23 hours ago

      It’s illegal on my town to have chickens on anything less than 5 acres. I have an acre that backs up to woods far enough away that a couple hens would be no problem, but nope. One of my neighbors has 4.6 acres and used to have chickens but had to get rid of them when they changed the law. Its extra sad that my house is an original 1900s farm house with the original barn that used to have donkeys, chickens, goats and a few cows sitting on 20 acres, now I’ll get fined to oblivion if I so much as get 1 quail.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      4·
      23 hours ago

      I don’t think it’s exactly against the law. Though the local HOA might have something to say about it.

      But noise complaints are noise complaints, whether or not you like the sound of chickens if they’re being too loud you’re going to get a knock on the door. Same as if you had a very annoying dog.

  • JupiterSnarl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 day ago

    I have neighbors with chickens 2 houses down. I can attest that the chicken sounds bring unexplained joy.

    • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      17 hours ago

      It’s that involuntary contentedness noise they make that I love. I can’t even begin to describe it, but when you get a load of happy chickens loafing about somewhere warm they make a super-relaxing sound that’s like their equivalent of purring.

  • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
    18·
    2 days ago

    Around mid-2020 I worked at a callcenter. The organization I worked for had lower tiers of support via a callcenter in the Philippines and higher tiers via the stateside callcenter I worked at. When everyone went remote some of the staff at the Philipines callcenter emigrated to other countries and there was one particular member who always had some very noisy chickens in the background of their calls. It seriously reminded me how nice remote work can be for folks because this guy was chilling at home with his chickens nearby instead of in a stuffy office with a bunch of other unhappy underpaid callcenter workers. It was funny though how some customers reacted to it, sometimes it would just be one more thing for angry customers to complain about and other times it would be a wistful thing a customer commented about in a later positive review

            • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca
              53·
              2 days ago

              I don’t know why people are so defensive about the fact that cats enjoy killing things for pleasure. They love seeing things in pain. They love watching them die slowly.

              • ContriteErudite@lemmy.world
                91·
                2 days ago

                You shouldn’t anthropomorphize animal behavior by misinterpreting their instincts for human emotions. Feral and tame cats of all kinds will play with their food to hone hunting skills. Dogs will ravage and eviscerate other animals as play. Hamsters will eat their offspring under circumstances where it would mean the parent has a better chance to survive without them.

                Cats do not “love seeing things in pain” for the same reason that dogs don’t “love” seeing a toy rabbit torn to shreds: both behaviors are rooted in their hunting instincts. True sadism (hurting or killing another being for no reason other than pleasure) has only been observed in animal groups that also possess higher-ordered cognitive and social traits, such as cetaceans and apes.

        • affenlehrer@feddit.org
          8·
          2 days ago

          Have you seen their genitalia? They kind of have to. Besides that I’ve seen very cute and happy looking duck couples.

          • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org
            183·
            2 days ago

            Afaik it evolved like that for better raping. At least that’s what our biology teacher told us, after we had to watch a video about duck mating.

            There are also no real couples. Most of the time several males try to get it on with the same duck and it’s not rare that their object of desire drowns because they can’t wait their turn. Nature is fucked up.

            • Wren@lemmy.todayEnglish
              211·
              2 days ago

              Ducks have diverse mating habits, like humans. They don’t have to rape, but they will when there’s overcrowding, males outcompete females, and/or they live in an urban environment where females lack the strength and space to escape.

              Otherwise, most species of ducks form seasonal pair bonds with new mates each year. Some come back to the same mate each year, which isn’t quite the same as monogamy since they don’t stick together when not fucking and rearing young. A few ducks will mate for life, and a lot of larger waterfowl, like geese and swans, are monogamous.

              • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org
                2·
                2 days ago

                Thanks for the additional insights!

                I knew at least the part about swans. There was a huge pair of swans treating the small town they chose to live in as their personal garden and terrorizing people in traffic (pedestrians but people in cars as well). They were horrible but also treated like a holy cow, nobody was allowed to touch them and the official stance of the town was to let them be. So from time to time there were swan caused traffic jams and children knew to avoid them.

                • Wren@lemmy.todayEnglish
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  I haven’t even met them and I love those birds. Reminds me of Canada Gooses, the source of deep respect and utter annoyance as our avian fellow countrymen.

                  One of my BFFs is an environmental scientist who loves ducks, which means get loaded with duck facts that spill over onto others.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48·
    2 days ago

    I used to have chickens in a city when it wasn’t legal. They got reported and we had to rehome them. They were fun, though, and having fresh eggs was always great.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        Oh yeah. Next door neighbor. She’s been a nightmare. She threw fits demanding we move one of our fences. She systematically sprayed our plants with Round Up every year. She once hired unqualified dumbasses to cut down one of their trees which hit our house on the way down. (They felled it from the bottom “TIMBER” style as if it wasn’t a crowded suburban residential neighborhood.)

        Yeah, she was a huge pain to live right next to. And then she died and her daughter moved in. And she’s just as bad. :\ We just avoid her.

        • IronBird@lemmy.world
          9·
          1 day ago

          have you tried using a spray-water bottle to punish bad behavior, it works on dogs and cats maybe it’ll work on something less intelligent?

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      My old principal used to keep chickens, it’s from her we bought ours. Met her again many years later, and while catching up I inquired if she was still keeping chickens. Since the big bird flu thing in the 201Xs (I think) she stopped keeping them, because the law changed how you’re allowed to keep them, and she felt like while it’s obviously good from an epidemiological point of view, it’d reduce their overall quality of life and that just made her really depressed.

      I miss having chickens.

      We had a cockerel named Papa Stroganoff, he’s one of the ones we got from my principal. The reason he was named thus, is because at one point she’d brought home leftover stroganoff from the school lunch, and when she dumped it out for the chickens to eat, he dashed up and sorted out all of the sausage pieces to one side for the hens to eat.

      He was such a good rooster.

  • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
    281·
    1 day ago

    I moved into a house with roommates who had chickens. It wasn’t great. The chickens were cool, but they attract vermin. We had a real rat issue for a while, and they wouldn’t believe me that the rats were going after the chicken feed/poop, as well as the warmth of the coop. Then, they got tired of tending to the birds and rehomed them. Sure enough, the rat problem vanished.

    Edit: I appreciate that everyone wants to give me chicken tips, but they birds weren’t ever mine, I didn’t ever want the birds, and we no longer have the birds, so the tips aren’t doing anything for me.

    • Anivia@feddit.org
      2·
      1 day ago

      Sounds like the chickens were just severely overfed if they had excess food available for rats to steal. If you feed them only the right amount they need, they are going to kill and eat any rat attempting to steal their food without hesitation. They are predators after all

    • zout@fedia.io
      8·
      2 days ago

      I have chickens, but no rats because I took precautions against rats, foxes, martens and whatever else roams outside. It’s not even difficult to do this, just make sure there’s no food laying around, and plan for the coop to be vermin proof.

      • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 days ago

        Stores that sell chicken supplies often sell vermin resistant metal trash cans with snug fitting lids. Just dump the feed in there.