A dual-purpose chicken is a type that can produce both eggs and meat. This sounds efficient, but there is a downside. Be sure to consider the trouble with raising dual-purpose chickens.
Dual purpose chicken breeds sounded so perfect! Too good to be a true. A livestock that can serve two purposes. One animal, two uses. As someone who’s always out for a good deal, that’s quite the win-win situation right there.
But hold on a second there… for every seemingly perfect situation there may be a very real downside.
Before we got our first batch of chickens, we spent months trying to decide which breeds of chicken would be perfect for our situation. We wanted to raise our birds for eggs and for meat. We knew for sure we didn’t want to get a meat-specific breed like Cornish Cross. Although they grow fast and are ready for the dinner table in 12 weeks, they also don’t live long enough to lay eggs.
On the other hand, we also didn’t want a chicken breed that was specifically meant for egg production. These epic layers like Leghorns are often skinny, weighing less than half that of a meat bird. There’s truly not much meat to be had on a Leghorn, and what is there tends to be stringy and tough.
That’s not good eating.
Lucky for us, dual-purpose chicken breeds exist for that very reason.
But is it really lucky?
Dual Purpose chicken breeds sound great at first, eggs and meat from one bird? What could go wrong? Well, we’re here to tell you…
What are Dual-Purpose Chickens?
Most homesteaders keep chickens for two reasons, eggs and meat. Through selective breeding, chickens have been adapted for specific purposes:
Meat Chickens:
Meat chickens, also called broilers or roasters, have been bred to grow quickly with lots of meat. Meat chickens are butchered young while their meat is still tender, between 8 to 12 weeks for broilers and 12 and 20 weeks for roasters.
Since meat chickens put on mass quickly, and because of that quick weight gain, their body structure can’t keep up. Their hearts are weak, their legs are frail, and they are often so heavy that they can’t manage to stand for longer than a few minutes. Meat chickens are not used for eggs since they will not live long enough to begin laying.
Egg Laying Chickens:
Egg laying chickens have been bred over the years to be hearty and produce eggs. Hens grow more slowly. They mature and begin laying eggs in about 16 to 24 weeks after they hatch.
Egg laying chickens are available in a variety of breeds, colors, and body sizes. Their eggs vary in size and color from blue, brown, speckled, white, and everything in between. Egg laying chickens can live for up to 10 years, although the amount of eggs they lay will decline as they grow older.
Dual-Purpose Chickens:
A dual-purpose chicken is a breed that lays eggs, but is still large enough to process extra roosters and older hens to consume.
Common chicken breeds raised for both eggs and meat include Australorp, Dominique, New Hampshire Red, Orpington, Plymouth Rocks, Rhode Island Red, Speckled Sussex, and Wyandottes.
The Trouble with Dual Purpose Chickens
Here’s the trouble with dual purpose chicken breeds. You buy the cute little chicks with all the best intentions. You tell yourself, “They are just livestock, not pets.”
You repeat this phrase over and over to yourself, convinced you’ll believe it if you say the words enough.
But…
Over time you grow attached to the little buggers. You slowly convince yourself that these are actually layer hens and their sole purpose on earth is to provide you with fresh eggs. The entertainment is an added bonus.
You forget to look at them as meat. You forget that they aren’t meant to be pets with benefits. You forget the dual part of the dual purpose. You forget that you chose them because they will provide you with eggs and meat.
And then you remember again.
This experience with the chickens has led me to some new thoughts about future livestock endeavors. While a dual-purpose farm animal is great in theory, the reality is that at some point you have to decide when that purpose turns from one to the other. When that animal stops being a provider of fiber, milk, or eggs and when they become a provider of meat.
In reality it’s much easier to purchase an animal and tell yourself this animal is meant for meat. I will not name it, I will not pet it, I will not grow attached to it. I will raise it until it is of a proper size and then it will become meat.
All this to say…. We run a homestead and we have butchered and eaten our hens. This is a topic that a lot of homesteaders don’t talk about for fear of ridicule. It’s not an easy thing to explain to someone who’s never done it.
When we tell people that we sometimes eat the chickens that we raise they tend to shudder and say, “How can you do that? How can you kill an animal that you raised?”
This is what we tell them…
While it is very difficult, and sad, we also know for a fact that the chicken on our dinner plate lived the best life it possibly could. These chickens had one bad moment, one bad second in their whole lives. The rest of their time on this planet was spent chasing after bugs, sleeping in a warm and dry coop, chattering with friends, basking in the sun, and frolicking through the woods. Their lives were ended quickly and humanely and they went on to nourish our family.
When you compare the lives of our chickens to those living in factory farms, crammed together in cages, living in filth, suffering for all of their short lives… well there is no comparison. We love our chickens, and we love knowing that the chicken on our dinner plate was treated well and literally had just one bad moment in its whole life.
While several of our hens have cleverly elevated themselves to pet status with their charm and cuddly nature, most of the chickens in our coop will end up as dinner, either our own dinner or that of the neighborhood fox. This is the reality of homesteading, we need to end lives to continue living our own.
We’ve learned a lot over many years of raising chickens. Butchering the animals that you raise doesn’t get easier, but with the current state of agriculture, the reasons behind it become clearer.
So here’s the thing…
If you’re considering raising dual-purpose chickens with the intent of them actually being dual purpose farm animals, you have some thinking to do.
When the time comes, are you going to have the strength to butcher them? Are you the type to get attached to the cuteness and lovable nature of animals? Could you cook and eat an animal that you raised by hand?
If you find yourself currently nodding along or rapidly shaking your head side to side, take note of that feeling. Raising farm animals is not always fun and games, there will come a time when tough decisions have to be made, and acted upon.
And that, my friends, is the trouble with dual-purpose chicken breeds.
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[sc name=”Meredith” ]
Loved reading your post…you have a way of helping me visualize your struggles with having dual purpose chickens…yes we have to live and have to eat…your chickens/ducks are the most cared for animals on the planet…keep on writing…
I agree completely. Unless you are going to be a vegetarian, and that is not for most people, IMO, it is important to know where you food comes from. Butchering can be difficult, but it is a part of life. You are correct, they have had a good life, well fed and taken care of.
Thank you!
Wonderful article, thank you! Just recently we had 12″ of spring snow here in SWVA and lost power for several days. The eggs I was trying to hatch were history. The baby chicks I had just bought… I popped them into a small box and set it as close to the woodstove as I dared and still lost 3 little silkies. Thankfully the power came back on a day and a half ahead of prediction.
I was sitting next to the stove with a candle listening to the peeps coming out of the box and picking a store-bought chicken for soup–sad looking thing! I started reflecting: it was just before Easter and signs were up about them being livestock, not pets. I realized they start out as cute fuzzy things, become wonderful egg-laying things and then they become soup. Period. SO.. after the power came back on I went out and doubled my amount of chicks. I figure that if there’s so many that you can’t name or focus on more than a few then it will be easier to follow the livestock cycle. Some will inevitably become pets. I have silkies for taking care of future new chicks. I’m going to give them a box on the floor with a silky-size entrance that the big chicks can’t fit in through–an escape pod of sorts.
I also read your article on broody hen vs. incubator. For me, the less interaction I have with them the more I can view them as food. The only way I can afford to live is to be sustainable with some survivalist thrown in. They’re going to be chickens whether you love on them or not. They’re going to go back to their coop every evening regardless.
I love chickens! Lost the last 37 to a predator raid a few years back. This time there will be a new coop and yard and it’ll be going up “barn-raising” style here soon so I need to have all the materials on site and the plan on paper–am most of the way there. This will be very secure with the buried fencewire under the perimeter and big rocks around it coupled with a good and supported cover of welded wire to keep out anything that can climb (most things) or jump that high (yotes). Their escape hatch to the wide wide world will funnel them downhill toward the creek and hopefully none will find my front porch!
With egg-only breeds, any roosters not needed for breeding would need to be slaughtered as chicks, and it wouldn’t provide nutrition for people. I believe it is more humane to raise all of the chickens — not just the hens — until they’ve grown up, and then sacrificing them for the dinner table if they can’t produce eggs and aren’t needed for breeding. To me, it seems like a painful waste of life to kill 50% of the chicks before they got to really live.
Those are my thoughts.
What are your thoughts on keeping a couple of dual purpose ones on the chance that you want to breed them later for meat birds?
I really think we’ll go with a cornish cross for our meat birds. However, if there was ever a time when we couldn’t afford to buy the cornish cross chicks, I’d like to have the ability to breed a meat breed at home. I’d prefer not to do rangers unless I absolutely had to because it IS more economical to raise cornish cross than rangers. Is it crazy to just keep a pair of dual purpose on hand as pets and plan to use their offspring as meat birds if necessary?? Or should I just plan on doing half cornish cross, half rangers just in case I need my own chicks?
Sarah, Decisions, decisions… You can keep dual purpose for consumption. Just keep in mind that it takes longer for the birds to mature (more feed cost and more time to get attached) and there is much less meat than your typical broiler.
Freedom Rangers seem like the best of both. I have not raised Rangers myself, but my friend, Quinn wrote about her experiences raising Freedom Rangers back in 2011.
Hi just wanted to say I really enjoyed the article. When I saw it I thought “what can it be? Quality, vulnerability, what? I should have known, we have been having this debate for years as we are looking to move to a more self reliant life style, we currently have show chicken’s and eggs for hatching or eating but as we mainly keep bantams there’s really not much food on them and the ones that are despatched are mainly for ‘humanitarian’ reasons so not anything we would risk eating anyway.
Very well written initially irritated at how you refused to let on what the problem was but then loved it when I saw where you were going. Also appreciated the neat little summary of the two groups of chicken’s.
Neat little article that was informative and made me chuckle while pointing out an important issue that everybody getting into animal husbandry have to deal with. Well done.