ugh it’s so hot! it’s so hot. I
Jul. 2nd, 2018 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2z29wgL
ugh it’s so hot! it’s so hot.
I don’t mind so much for myself, I can find ways around it, but the animals. The poor animals. We’ve given them all as much water as we can get to them, we’re checking on them as often as we can, and still– last night, between the last check-in at 3pm and this morning, we had 103 of the broiler chickens die in their pasture pens. They carry their own shade with them, but there’s no way for us to provide additional shade, that we can figure out, and we just– it’s perfectly possible for chickens to tolerate these kinds of temperatures, they’re not too crowded in there, there’s shade and water, but their bodies aren’t used to it. This heat wave is so sudden, they haven’t had time to acclimate. We’ve tried to angle the pens slightly for better airflow but there’s almost no wiggle room. And it didn’t help. Well, it seemed to have helped one pen, where none died, and the one next to it lost 16. (The youngest group was fine, the middle group not great… it’s worse as the animals get larger, and their larger bodies generate more heat.) But down at the bottom of the hill, where the group we’re processing tomorrow was, we lost 86 out of 180, which is a brutal, and expensive, blow, and also is distressing because we try so hard to give those animals a humane existence. There’s just no way to mitigate the heat. Pigs, you can spray with water or extend the side of the pasture for more shade. Egg chickens, they have more freedom because they know how to avoid predators, so they had no fatalities because they were free to move to breezier parts of the pasture. But the broilers just– had nowhere to go, and their bodies couldn’t handle it. It was 96 here, which that breed of chicken routinely tolerates, but it hasn’t gone above 89 in two years.
The survivors were already panting this morning as we moved them, which is normal chicken behavior but ominous because it wasn’t even 8am.
We don’t know what to do, and there’s really nothing we can do. We’re going to try to hang shade cloth over the pens to give another layer of shade, but it’s not something we’re equipped for. And, again, if it weren’t so sudden, it wouldn’t even have been a problem.
(Your picture was not posted)
ugh it’s so hot! it’s so hot.
I don’t mind so much for myself, I can find ways around it, but the animals. The poor animals. We’ve given them all as much water as we can get to them, we’re checking on them as often as we can, and still– last night, between the last check-in at 3pm and this morning, we had 103 of the broiler chickens die in their pasture pens. They carry their own shade with them, but there’s no way for us to provide additional shade, that we can figure out, and we just– it’s perfectly possible for chickens to tolerate these kinds of temperatures, they’re not too crowded in there, there’s shade and water, but their bodies aren’t used to it. This heat wave is so sudden, they haven’t had time to acclimate. We’ve tried to angle the pens slightly for better airflow but there’s almost no wiggle room. And it didn’t help. Well, it seemed to have helped one pen, where none died, and the one next to it lost 16. (The youngest group was fine, the middle group not great… it’s worse as the animals get larger, and their larger bodies generate more heat.) But down at the bottom of the hill, where the group we’re processing tomorrow was, we lost 86 out of 180, which is a brutal, and expensive, blow, and also is distressing because we try so hard to give those animals a humane existence. There’s just no way to mitigate the heat. Pigs, you can spray with water or extend the side of the pasture for more shade. Egg chickens, they have more freedom because they know how to avoid predators, so they had no fatalities because they were free to move to breezier parts of the pasture. But the broilers just– had nowhere to go, and their bodies couldn’t handle it. It was 96 here, which that breed of chicken routinely tolerates, but it hasn’t gone above 89 in two years.
The survivors were already panting this morning as we moved them, which is normal chicken behavior but ominous because it wasn’t even 8am.
We don’t know what to do, and there’s really nothing we can do. We’re going to try to hang shade cloth over the pens to give another layer of shade, but it’s not something we’re equipped for. And, again, if it weren’t so sudden, it wouldn’t even have been a problem.
(Your picture was not posted)
