My Favorite Chicken Reads

I like chickens.  I also like books a lot.  Unsurprisingly, I think chicken books are pretty great—the perfect marriage of two of my favorite things.  Here are some thumbnail reviews of a few of my favorite chicken books.  Full reviews of many of these books can be found elsewhere on my blog.

Chickens from Outer Space? The Strange Case of South American Chickens

Not only are South American chickens very strange birds, but they’ve been in South America way too long.  When the Spanish first arrived in South America they noted the fact that there were already chickens there!  People were keeping domestic chickens!  Chickens, like cows, pigs, and sheep, are supposedly Old-World animals.  So what were they doing in South America before the Old-World explorers/conquerors got there?  How did they get there? Flying saucers, anybody? 

Hen vs. Rooster - The Art, History, and Science of Sexing Chickens

Regardless, of whether we enjoy chickens through cracking open a dozen fresh pasture raised eggs, by digging into a box of fast-food fried chicken, or by tending our backyard pet chickens, we are all in collusion with an industry that kills half of the baby chicks as soon as they hatch because they’re roosters. Scientists have been working on a solution to this dilemma for a number of years and a real, practical solution may be near at hand.

Salmonella in Chickens – Why CDC Wants You to Stop Kissing Your Hens – And Why the CDC Suggestions Are Not Working

There’s an ongoing serious Salmonella outbreak occurring among folks who keep backyard chickens, and CDC’s best response is to continue to trot out essentially the same old list of impractical rules.  Why is nobody working on eliminating Salmonella from chickens in general and backyard flocks in particular? In this post I suggest a strategy.

The Chickens of Vietnam and Cambodia

I ran into chickens everywhere I went in Vietnam and Cambodia: The urban streets of Hanoi, the hamlets along the Mekong River in Cambodia, pecking and scratching on the grounds of Buddhist monasteries, amongst the ruins of ancient Angkorian temples, and for sale in the local markets. Warning: Like everywhere else in the world, the people of Southeast Asia eat chickens, and that is discussed here. They also eat eggs and any number of things we don’t eat in the US.

Virulent Newcastle Disease Can Kill Your Backyard Flock

In May of 2018, backyard chickens in Los Angeles County, California began to die – first in one backyard, then in another, then in many, many more.  It was the beginning of the spread of a terrible scourge known as Virulent Newcastle Disease (vND), a contagious and deadly viral disease that affects birds.  By January 2019, in spite of the heroic efforts by staff of the US Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture, not only had vND found its way into large commercial flocks, it continued to spread through many, many more backyard flocks southern California.