How To Turn Your Chickens Into Pets

How do you raise chickens to be the perfect pet?

We’ve spoken on our website before about keeping chickens as pets. Normally people would keep chickens because they are productive and useful to have around. But today we wanted to look specifically at how to make sure your chickens are a good pet, particularly for the children.

There’s no doubt children love pets. Ours adore their chickens along with our other pets. However there is nothing quite like having a pet that will sit on your lap and curl up at night with you to sleep on your lap.

Now you can’t really get chickens to do that can you?

Yes you can. It’s not easy and you can’t do it with all chickens but its perfectly possible to get chickens which are as good a pet as a rabbit or a guinea pig and which will happily sleep on your child’s lap in the evening.

Here’s how you do it.

You need to start with young chicks. Preferably day-old chicks. You will need to provide housing for them with warmth and feed, so you will need to research a little about raising chicks.

It’s not hard, we do it all the time, with a simple box in the laundry with a light bulb suspended above the chicks for warmth. You start with a 100 watt bulb for maximum warmth then gradually replace those lightbulbs with bulbs of a smaller wattage as the chicks get older.

That will not, of it’s own, produce chickens that will be the perfect pet for children. What you need to do is to spend time every day with the chick, treating it as your pet.

We did this very successfully with a silky bantam hen which we raised from hatching in an incubator which we borrowed. Every day from day one my 9-year-old daughter took that chick from its box, kept it on her lap whilst sitting on the couch and patted it.

Once it was older it was completely tame and would run up to her and stand on her shoes whenever it saw her. It was happy to be picked up and cuddled and if you sat down it would snuggle in your lap.
So remember as well as providing lots of tasty eggs you can also turn your chickens into the perfect pet to your children that will sleep on their lap just like a rabbit or a cat will.

You just have to take the time to train it as you would with any other animal.

Tagged with: chicken cages • Chicken Houses • chickens • chicks • keeping chickens

Filed under: Keeping Poultry

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