If you like eating eggs, don’t raise your own chickens. They’ll completely ruin it for you.
I wouldn’t think wild birds could be anywhere near as disgusting as chickens are. Somewhere along the domesticating trail, I think we bred the cleanliness gene right out of chickens. If pheasants and grouse lived the way chickens do, predators would have no trouble at all finding their nests.
Chickens are nasty. Every few weeks, we have to go out to the coop and shovel out all the grossness those filthy birds live in. We have to deck ourselves out as close as we can get to HazMat suits, then wade into the coop, armed with shovels, rakes, brooms, trowels and a ShopVac. After chiseling dried chicken leavings off of every surface, including their food and water dispensers, we shovel it all out the door, sweep everything clean, and put down a new layer of straw bedding. The coop is beautiful and clean for about an hour, until the chickens come back in and start making it a horrible mess again.
If you clean a coop just once, you might swear off of eating eggs and chicken for the rest of your life. You have to wonder how much of that disgustingness ends up inside the chickens and their eggs.
That’s why I don’t eat chicken. I’ll eat grouse, pheasant, duck, goose, or other wild birds, but chicken just grosses me out. It’s amazing how much of a mess these relatively small animals can make in such a short amount of time.
Maybe it’s actually a defense mechanism, though. We haven’t had trouble with foxes or coyotes, even though I know we have both living on the property. Maybe even the predators are too grossed out to bother them, too.
