The perfect pet for children, and for adults, is to keep chickens. Keeping chickens has a number of benefits including the provision of wonderful free range eggs for the fridge and the capacity of chickens to eat all those rotten bugs that are eating your flowers.

Many people assume that keeping chickens is just something that you can do if you live in the country. However nothing could be further from the truth and there are plenty of people living in the middle of suburbia who have the delight of keeping pet chickens, and eating fresh free range eggs.

The keeping of chickens is often subject to rules and regulations, for example it is often prohibited to keep roosters and there are also sometimes regulations about the number of chooks you may have and where your chicken house may be located.

But after you’ve found out what you can and cannot do there are no other reasons why dwellers of suburbia are unable to keep backyard chickens in suburbia.

I am often asked how many chickens to have and what breed of chickens to buy.

Of course this is, in both cases, a matter of personal choice, however as a general guideline you will find that a good layer will produce around 300 eggs per year. Or roughly 5 to 6 eggs per week. This will subside during the winter.

You can then look at how many eggs you require to determine how many chooks to keep.

If you have too many eggs, as we always seem to find, you will also find that there are plenty of people close by who are happy to buy them from you, it’s very rare for anyone with chickens to have fresh free range eggs going to waste.

Using this figure most people find that 3 or 4 chooks is sufficient.

And then there is the question of what breed to buy and this depends on why you are keeping chickens. Are you keeping chickens for their looks or their eggs or their companionship?

Our children love fancy looking chickens and so we are the proud owners of some pure white silky bantams. Whilst they look wonderful and are fun to have around they lay small eggs, and not as many as some other breeds, and so are really only there for looks.

They look wonderful.

We have Isa Browns for their egg laying capacity. They do not sit on eggs very well and this means they are producing eggs for more days of the year, so are excellent layers. But they won’t hatch chicks for you.

Having chicks is a wonderful experience. Every time we do so our kids love it, and delight in watching the chicks grow up. There are some negatives to allowing your chickens to hatch chicks though, the main one being what to do with the chicks when they get older. Of course around 50 percent will be roosters and so you will need to find something to do with them. They make good soup, however you will need to consider the council regulations.

But those problems are minor when you consider the companionship value of keeping chickens, both for you and your children, as well as all those yummy eggs that you will get every day.

Peter’s website is at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au

New! We've just starting a message board and discussion forum over on the Toxic Byte Pets Forum. It's a bit lonely over there at the moment, but feel free to join in and participate!

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