What To Do When Chickens No Longer Lay Eggs | Chicken Coop Dimensions

What To Do When Chickens No Longer Lay Eggs


Photo courtesy Flickr user fooferkitten
So what do you do when your hen no longer lays eggs? Keep her around out of gratitude for all those years of eggs? Put her out to (someone elses) pasture? Or do you (gulp!) "process" her?

Theres been some traffic on the Silicon Valley Chickens mailing list recently about what to do with old hens, and it seems theres a general agreement that processing an old hen is a rather cruel way to show thanks for eggs well laid.

While some urban chicken keepers seem content to keep the old chooks around for amusement, the more economically minded chicken farmers seem less than enthralled with the idea of all those extra mouths to feed.

And those of us who live where there are tight restrictions on the number of hens allowed in a backyard cant really keep a flock of non-layers around if were in it for the omelets, can we?

So it seems theres two strategies for mercifully coping with the inevitable aging of hens:
  1. Once she stops laying (at age 3 or 4 or 5, depending on your hens productivity cycle), offer her up  to someone whos got a much larger patch of land and is willing to keep a large non-laying flock. Or,
  2. Sell her while shes still in her laying prime, commanding a higher price and making room for another fluffy chick in the coop to start all over again.
What have you done when your chickens stopped laying? Or if you havent gotten there yet, what are your plans for hens dun certain âge?

What To Do When Chickens No Longer Lay Eggs