If you want to keep something different as a pet, have you considered keeping a few hens?

They are fairly quiet, (as long as you only keep girls), can be fed on nice clean pellets, (supplemented with household vegetable scraps if money is tight), are no more difficult to keep clean than a pet rabbit. And they help pay for their keep by laying you eggs. And you will find that neighbours are more than happy to look after them when you are on vacation, because even adults love the novelty of fresh eggs to pick.

Are there drawbacks to keeping hens?

If you are particularly proud of your vegetable and flower garden, then you may find hens are quite destructive. We got around the problem by fencing off part of our garden to keep the dogs away from the hens (we have gundogs and they love any sort of bird. Then we made some raised beds for the vegetables and flowers, and built covers to go over the top. This has advantages because you can use plastic covers to create cold frames for your tender plants.

The hens can also be used to 'clean' the beds when the season is over - we just take the covers off and give the hens free access. They eat a lot of the greens, (makes the egg yolks orange!), uproot the weeds and remaining plants, eat bugs and add some fertiliser into the bargain. Add a handful of corn every few days and they will scratch deeper, and effectively 'dig' the ground.

So how much space do they need?

If you can let them free range, they can be kept in a relatively small space. Our first hen (a starving escapee from a intensive egg laying system, aptly named 'Ginger') stayed in an old ferret hutch until she recovered her strength. We then built a small run to go underneath a converted rabbit hutch, and bought her three 'friends'. This run is probably ten or twelve feet long by four feet across. We used corrugated plastic on top, which keeps the ground dry in our rather damp climate, and the hens often spend the bulk of the day in this small area, although they have complete freedom during the day.

Can they be kept in a rabbit hutch?

As long as they are let out daily, our four birds are quite happy in the rabbit hutch still. We removed the nest area, because the hens would sleep in it, making it very messy, and then lay in it. So we put a perch in across the full width, gave them a nest box in the garden, and they seem perfectly content with the situation.

How Many Eggs Can You Expect?

Depending on the breed of hen you select, some of these birds can lay 300 plus eggs per year. These prolific breeds have tended to live shorter lives than the more traditional varieties we have kept, and they also tend to cost more than the pure bred varieties. Egg production is also lower depending on the light supply. In southern Scotland, our hens tend to stop laying late December until maybe early February. We have never thought it right to add light to make them lay all year round, it is a natural cycle and we tend to think it is better for the birds.