Farewell To The Little Red Hen

 A few of our hens are red sex-link. A red sex-link chicken is a cross between a red rooster and a white hen. (Black sex links have Rhode Island Red fathers and Barred Rock mothers.) The red sex link hens resemble their fathers except for a white tail and other little patches of white.

This crossbreeding produces something unusual in the chicken world: newly hatched chicks that can be easily separated by sex right away because the male chicks’ coloration is different from the female chicks’.

The pure breeds of chicks all look alike, male and female. Only a highly trained chick sexer, usually a person of Japanese extraction, can tell the difference. The development of red and black sex-link chickens made it possible for any untrained person to sort chicks by sex.

Red sex-links also are good producers of brown eggs, but the eggs are gigantic.

The size of her eggs is a great disadvantage to the hen, principally because the large shells require more calcium than the hen can provide. As the hen ages, her egg shells become more and more fragile, no matter how much oyster shell we provide or how many eggs shells we return to the hens to eat. Often these eggs break in the nest and are consumed by the hen herself or other hens. The broken egg content also coats other eggs in the nest and makes them difficult to clean.

A couple of days ago one of our red sex link hens became ill or exhausted. She lay all day under one of the nest boxes. Yesterday morning she was dead. Dennis left her remains in the woods for the coyotes.

I have concluded that producing or keeping red sex link hens is unethical. I know, I’m some kind of nut, but it does not seem right to produce a chicken that lays gigantic eggs. What’s more, I’m deeply sorry for the little red hen, who gave her all producing eggs.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer