I keep chickens...They are super easy pets and give us eggs every day.

Natural cannibalism? Wuh? Did you get mixed up with this article? Properly farmed and treated, pasture-raised hens are less likely to attack one another than confined hens. It is often thought to be preferable to remove just the tiny hook at the end of their beaks (this is called beak tipping, and is very different…

Here's a nice Petaluma pasture-raised farm for you. That smudge of yellow and white flowers - that's the girls' playground! Egg Basket of America!

Eh, when I pull up to get my eggs, the ladies all cluster around me, squawking, and I have to admonish them that I am not there to feed them but to steal their children from a refrigerator in the outbuilding.

Three dollars, honor system, gets me a dozen corn-fed Rhode Island Red brown eggs.

My eggs are better than your…

Most working pasture-raised farms have a number of ways to keep predation down - just because the birds are living outdoors, doesn't mean they have to become victims. In many of the farms around Petaluma, for example, every flock has it's own guardian doggie - I forget the breed, but they are fiercely loyal and…

Our coop is raised about a metre off the ground and accessed through a hole in the floor. I found that slows the thieves down (although it wouldn't stop them entirely if they were determined). Mostly they just steal the chick feed from the ground and get chased around by the dominant hen.

If you go to the source, that being the HSUS website, you can see that the veracity of many of these terms depends on an accompanying certification, the most reliable of which being Certified Humane. By their measure, only pasture raised comes close, or even exceeds, what most people have in mind when they think of…

We have a small flock with three female turkeys.

Years ago, we had a pen full of Bantie hens. It was great fun to throw a big grasshopper in to them. They would chase each other around for a half hour, until one of them finally was able to eat it.

I live in Petaluma. If you miss the significance of that then you know jack shit about some eggs.

If that's not going to convince you to buy Cage-free, nothing will.

my life has gone far too long before being introduced to the term "daft nuggets"

Mine are back-garden ranged and occasionally kitchen-floor ranged when the weather gets too bad and they get too stroppy. The daft nuggets don't go back in the coop, of course, they just crowd around the back door and raise Cain.

That isn't how life works

As detailed in Niven's A World Out of Time...

No matter what the cost,IF we ever get there our attitude cannot be one of Manifest Destiny or "because its there". It has to be an attitude of "Lets not fuck up this time"...

No, I quite agree. God did not intend physics to be squishy. It's just not done, son.

Sounds like a good way to store lots of energy in a sci-fi story: a Delta Resonance Battery.