Finding Medical Help for Urban Chickens

Flickr photo courtesy Bruce Tuten

Not so long ago, it was nigh-well impossible to find a local veterinarian to care for a chicken in distress.

In 2008, vets might have had some experience with house birds (think: parakeets, parrots, etc), but those specializing in ailments relating to poultry were decidedly not setting up shop in an urban setting. Those vets were out by the farms where they had millions of potential patients.

But one of the signs that urban chickens are approaching mainstream is the urban ecosystem that has formed around the care and feeding of pet chickens. This ecosystem is still in its infancy, as finding a veterinarian who knows a thing or three about chickens is still a task best suited for email lists that light up with "HELP! anyone know a vet...?" requests when a hen is in distress.

Here in the Bay Area, a recent email chain on the Silicon Valley Chickens Yahoo! group ferreted out the following vets as being knowledgeable and chicken-friendly:

• Wildwood Veterinary Hospital in Portola Valley
• The Avian Clinic at the Cupertino Animal Hospital
• Dr Ava Ackerman at the Belmont Pet Hospital

If you're not here in the Bay Area, how do you go about finding help for your girls?

NOTE: If you know of any others that should be added to the list above, don't hesitate to let me know and I'll update this post.

Would You Go to Chicken Training Camp?

Flickr photo credit: jcolman

Did you know you could go to chicken training camp this summer? Yes, you read that right: chicken training camp.

While the idea sounds a tad eccentric, a bit of digging reveals that training chickens is a no-nonsense endeavor, especially for those that are training themselves to handle other animals.

Legacy Canine (a dog training school) is running a series of chicken training camps this year, and here's how they got into the chicken business:

Legacy has been hosting dog training camps since the 1980’s.  In the old days the camps had 120 participants, many from overseas.  Terry decided that a convenient on-site training model should be provided for people flying in and unable to bring their dogs.  For several years Legacy campers trained rats in Skinner boxes.  In the early 90’s Ingrid Kang Shallenberger (Sea Life Park) and Terry Ryan, began using bantam chickens as training models at Legacy camps... In 1994 Terry asked Marian Breland-Bailey and Bob Bailey to share their years of animal training experience with Legacy campers.  For several years Marian and Bob taught the chicken unit at Legacy Camps.  Terry has included chickens in her current instructor’s courses “Coaching People to Train Their Dogs” and conducts one-day “Poultry in Motion” chicken training workshops.  Bob Bailey retired in 2008 from teaching his continuing education series of U.S. based chicken training workshops.

Now, we urban chicken farmers know our chickens to be intelligent creatures, but I have to admit even I was taken aback at finding out hens are used by click-trainers to hone their skills for use on other non-poultry species.

And hey, what could match the joy of adding "certified Chicken Trainer" to one's CV underneath the heading "Urban Chicken Farmer"?

BONUS reading for those of you already intrigued by animal training, here's an insightful white paper entitled "The Misbehavior of Organisms?"

GMOs: Knowing what's in your food, and mine

I've just finished watching the film Genetic Roulette, and I'll never look at the food on store shelves the same way again.

I've also voted for the film to receive the AwareGuide Top Transformational Film of 2012. It's that good.

As an urban chickens fan, I hope you'll join me in doing the same, and for your convenience, the film is embedded below:

Now, one of the many benefits of raising urban chickens is our ability to control exactly what our hens eat as they produce the eggs we then eat ourselves.  This kind of food sourcing control gives us the power to decide to take the time and effort to produce organic eggs from free range hens. Whether we go through that effort is ultimately up to us, but at the very least, we're well aware of what our hens are eating. We know where our food is coming from.

Would that this knowing were true of all the food we eat here in the United States. There's significant pressure from the food industry, via Monsanto, et al, to keep us consumers from knowing whether there are GMOs in the food we buy at market. The Europeans are ahead of us in labeling all the GMO food produced over there. We've got to do the same here, especially after the millions of dollars that were spent by the food industry defeating Prop 37 here in California last fall.

Please take a moment now to visit this AwareGuide page and vote for Genetic Roulette to receive the AwareGuide Top Transformational Film, 2012 award.

Friday night thriller for the hen house

In honor of the spooky season so close in the rear view mirror (and my own recent viewing of Prometheus), here's a fun short, "Of Eggs and Aliens" that's sure to thrill the girls in your coop.

Five-minutes of Urban Chickens bliss

Still trying to convince your friends that urban chickens are a good idea? Share with them this delightful little video about urban chickens in Portland, Oregon.



Can't see it here? See it on YouTube.

Nuggets of info in the film include the average egg travels 1500 miles from farm to table and there are an estimated 2,500 households in Portland who keep chickens in their backyard. Oh, and the mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, makes a cameo, too.

Kudos to Rachel Sklar, Colin Christopher, and Caroline Koehler, 2010 fellows of the Northwest Institute for Social Change for writing, producing and editing this video. While they picked a great name for the video, there's no affiliation with this blog except for our passion for urban chickens. And many thanks to the folks over at Mad City Chickens for dropping a link to the film in my Facebook feed.

I wonder how we go about getting a census of all urban chicken owners in the USA?

100 seconds of chickens in a photo shoot

I never realized my girls were strutting in hopes of being discovered for the catwalk.
 

Now I know better!

(see the video over on YouTube) 

What does a cage-free, free range egg look like?

Got urban chickens but still stuck buying eggs from the store? This is an awesome six-minute video from The Lexicon of Sustainability that demystifies the marketing terms of "cage-free" and "free range" for what they really mean (gimmicks at best).

Watch The Story of an Egg on PBS. See more from The Lexicon of Sustainability.

Great to see Alexis Koefoed of Soul Food Farm, among others, show just what the literal term "Pasture Raised" means to both us as consumers and our hens as producers