For a number of years we have been keeping chickens as a way to turn table scraps in to eggs (not landfill) and create a better compost for the vegies we grow.

What do you do if/when the chickens stop laying?

This is the dilemna that we faced as our chooks came to the end of their laying life-cycle.

The background to the chooks

I must say that I was not the biggest fan of the chickens when we got them as a hand-me-down from friends initiallly. It had a certain Beverly Hillbillys flavor to it for me, not having grown up with them around. My wife has always wanted chickens and had mentioned them a number of times, until friends of our who had chooks, announced that they were moving overseas and were looking for a new home for them. Before I knew it, arriving in our driveway were four chickens in a coop on a trailer, driven by a very happy wife. A skeptic from the start I was hooked after our first Saturday morning fry-up with our new fresh  and local eggs.

Daily routine

After the initial resistance, I grew quite fond of them and they became part of our daily life. Letting them out each morning and locking the up at night, having neighbours look after them when we’d go away for a weekend etc. The suburban neighbourhood we’d now moved to only had a few families with chickens. Over the past few years, there has been a steady increase in the chicken populous in our suburb, and I suspect others as well, as people become more conscious about their impact on the environment, food miles, food waste or just simply the joy in the simplicity of having fresh and local eggs.

One Saturday morning, unusually, we were lying in bed not having to rush off to a sporting commitment, when there was the unmistakable ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ of a rooster sound coming from our backyard. It seems that one of the chickens we got from a friend was not a chicken at all, but a rooster. In our council, the law prohibits the keeping of roosters for exactly the ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ reason.  There was only one logical option. The rooster had to go. While I had heard and read how to dispatch chickens for food, I’d never done it myself. I wanted it to be painless (as possible) for the rooster and wasn’t confident I could do it without distressing the bird. I contacted a friend who had done this before to walk me through it. It was not quite as difficult as I had imagined, and gave me a whole new perspective on the value of the bird, not just in terms of the meat, but, also knowing where my food was coming from.

Armed with this knowledge and respect for these birds, the time had come to dispatch them for food.