Where the chickens roost at night...#savethechickens

 Photo from tripadvisor.co.uk

Every day the sun sets over the equator and every day chickens in Uganda seek refuge for the night hoping to survive countless predators, including thieves. For a successful farmer, the possibilities are endless, most often locking their chickens away in huts or chicken coops for the night to ensure their poultry’s safety. However, for the few that can afford very little, a different way of providing safety for their chickens emerged decades ago. This innovative method involved training their chickens to climb up nearby trees so that they can roost in safety.

Now if you know anything about chickens, they do not really fly. They leap or jump off the ground for short periods of time with the use of their wings so casually flying up into trees is not an option for them; they must climb. Through what could be classified as Ivan Pavlov’s  “Classical Conditioning” form of learning, the farmers conditioned their chickens to roost in the nearby trees when night fell. This behavior is instinctive in chickens, so training them to roost in trees every evening is a natural and unforced behavioral change, hence why it became a common practice.

The chickens in rural Uganda are the true definition of free-range, spending their days roaming farmlands and their nights sleeping freely in trees. Like the ladders in chicken coops, the chickens hop up the trees to a safe height where they can comfortably rest their eyes and know that the probability of them opening their eyelids the following morning is relatively high. Please note however, that this was not always the safest choice for chickens because back in the day when there were fewer settlements and more wildlife, attempts to find safety in trees were futile. This was because the most common predator in the area was none other than the tree-lurking leopard.

The new fight for these chickens these days however, is not only finding safety from obvious predators during the night, but the silent predators that come in the form of diseases and parasites. One of these killers is Newcastle Disease (NCD), a contagious bird disease that wipes out thousands of chickens every year. These chickens do not have a fighting chance without a vaccine against NCD. However, with the new KUKUSTAR I-2 Thermostable NCD vaccine, Brentec Vaccines is giving farmers the chance to protect their poultry from a much bigger threat.