COMMERICAL HYBRIDS

The commercial hybrids are very special hens, carefully selected over the last 50 years to provide our exploding population with high quality food at an affordable price, with the minimum of health problems for the birds.

After the last war most of the commercial flocks were outdoor birds, based on Rhode Island Reds, Leghorns, and a few other pure breeds. Battery units were in the minority but had been growing. The battery concept of keeping a few birds together had been around since before Victorian times.
With the boom in birth rate and increasing demand for good quality food the flocks of pure breeds reached the limits of their capability. The national commercial flocks became sickly with up to 50% mortality and serious disease, welfare and food safety issues.
In an effort to clean up the health and improve the productivity the industry combined resources, brought millions of birds inside and embarked on a massive breeding and testing regime.
All birds were tested for the major illnesses and positive reactors were culled.
Then massive laying trials were set up to record the productivity of individual birds and strains. The very best were brought together to produce the basic foundation stocks.

Since then the egg production industry has become incredibly sophisticated, creating different strains to match different conditions, husbandry methods and feed availability all around the world.

These birds are vital in the ability of our society to provide cost effective food in the increasingly limited space available to food production. Chicken and eggs are much more efficient sources of protein than any others. They are now so integral to the staple diet of the developed world.

The laying birds have had certain traits exemplified to fit the production methods and others are lost being unneccessary. There are various examples of this.
FEATHERING - being kept in an equible even temperate environment means that feathering is of little consequnce, Strong thick layers of waterproof feathers are costly in feed resources and not sensible if the central heating is always on. So they have poor quality, thin, weakly waterproof covering. Even the birds who are kept in the large free range units are not reared outside so the better growth is not triggered by the weather as they mature.
DOCILITY - the commercial hybrids are far more tolerant of their neighbours proximity and far less aggressive to each other than the true ranging birds and pure breeds. This means they cope better with close confinement in a way the stronger more vigorous birds simply wouldn't. In association they are also much less active and, to be honest, less interesting.
FEED REQUIREMENTS - the nutrition of these birds is a precise science, and they require high quality nutrition at all times to match their productivity. Its grossly unfair on them to force them to produce eggs on what many back garden birds are given: grains, scraps and vegetables. The commercial birds need a good 16- 18% protein diet with all the balanced micronutrients. They are genetically programmed to produce eggs and if they do not have the correct nutrition they strip their own bodies resources.
EGG SHELL - one of the problems of such high production has been keeping the shells thick enough to cope with the handling from hen to box. Any cracking in the shells means the egg cannot be sold in the shell, it has to go to processing. This is significantly less profitable. Much research is going on to improve the shell quality, but its something that declines with age. After a couple of years laying the tendancy of the shells to crack inside the bird rises dramatically, and death follows the resulting peritonitis. This is frequently the fate of so-called "rescue" birds, those rehomed from cage units to inexperienced domestic owners. The condition is rarely treatable and birds should be diagnosed quickly and put out of their misery, unfortunately one too often hears of birds "just being quiet and unhappy for a few days with a dirty bottom" and then dying. They have suffered badly.
IMMUNITY - because they never have to meet all the disease challenges of the outdoor bred and kept birds, the immunity of these hybrids is very much weaker. If you are intending to keep birds outside its best to raise them outside from 8 - 12 weeks old onwards so their bodies have a chance to react to bugs around when its at its most active growing and developing stages. Its really harsh to put birds who have a weak immune system outside, especially after several years of being in the protective indoor environment.

We will not keep or raise the soft commercial red hybrids or the new fashionable 'pure bred copies' up here. It is not fair to inflict the environmental conditions of most of the UK on these birds which have poor feathering, poor flesh cover and low disease resistance to the bugs that are carried by the wild bird population. These birds are bred to be cossetted indoors, even in the commercial free range units. They are not bred to waste food and energy on keeping warm, dry or fending off diseases. There are good reasons why poultry production is concentrated in certian areas of the country, they are in the more moderate climates and conditions.

Tim and Jill Bowis
Kintaline Mill Farm, Benderloch, OBAN Argyll PA37 1QS Scotland
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