One or more of your hens not laying? Worried you're not getting a full return on your poultry purchases?
A while ago I was struggling to identify the errant chicken and turned to my friends at the iVillage Garden Web forum for some amusing suggestions to the problem of how to identify who was light in the egg laying department. Here are the suggestions...
* Attach hairnets to chickens' rears and wait to see who ends up with an empty net.
* Kill one chicken to see if this reduces the egg output. If it does the culprit has yet to be found, so kill another and so on. As soon as the latest loss makes no difference to the number of eggs you know you've solved the problem. Tough if it's the last chicken alive that's the guilty one!
* Weigh the girls the night before and again after you find the eggs.
* Separate and feed each with different radioactive isotopes. Then check the resulting eggs.
* Use a pipette and drip a different coloured food dye on each nether region to streak the eggs and identify each layer.
* Invite them all to a meeting, inform them you're in the process of restructuring, there may have to be redundancies and explain productivity will be one of the considerations. Each chicken should be assigned a workstation and appraised periodically. After the consultation period is over the errant chicken should first be given a chance with retraining for a more suitable role, such as a course on self basting, or wine tasting for marinating.
Many thanks for the suggestions to Marlingardener from Texas and Heather38’s husband from East Coast USA.
