The kids have been pestering you for weeks about getting a pet. You consider getting a dog but you know that the barking will annoy the neighbours. And you also know that you don’t want a dog pooping all over the garden. Cats are nice but they scratch furniture. Have you considered keeping chickens as the ideal way to provide low maintenance pets for the kids?

There’s so many reasons why keeping chickens is such a great hobby, and why chickens make such wonderful pets. You’ll never hear a chicken barking, and although a rooster crows there is absolutely no need for you to get a rooster. And kids love having chickens, I know my kids spend hours playing with the chickens.

And on top of that you have an added bonus. Eggs.

So many people consider exotic pets like ferrets, failing to consider that chickens make one of the best pets around. However before you tell the kids you’re heading out to buy some hens for them you need to consider where you will house them. You need a good hen house .

Chicken houses need not be big if you only have 3 or 4 hens. It will need a good sheltered nesting area where they can lay their eggs as well as perches for them to sleep on at night.

A good hen house is easy to build. A large part of the chicken house is simply wire mesh, and building a chicken house is a simple matter of building a frame of treated timber and covering the frame with wire. It is usually unnecessary to have a floor on the house as it sits on the ground.

And a small henhouse for 3 or 4 hens, if you add wheels one end and handles the other, can be moved around the garden so that the chicken droppings can fertilise the lawn in different spots from time to time. And there’s no reason chickens can’t free range around the garden during the day.

Building a chicken coop is the perfect handyman project. Get together with the kids one afternoon, after finding a simple set of plans on the Internet, and start building your own chicken house. It shouldn’t be expensive or difficult to do and it’s a great way to spend some quality time with the kids.

So grab that hammer and nails, go round up the kids and spend the weekend having some quality time building a chicken house. Buy your hens and you’ve got the perfect solution to finding a pet that will keep the kids happy and the fridge stocked with eggs.

Then all you need to do is learn how to make omelettes and you’re happy as well As the kids.

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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 5:35 am and is filed under Choosing a pet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.