The Great Chicken Coop

How Easy is it to Find Live Chickens to Raise in 2023?

As some of you might have heard me mention I was looking for live chickens for my daughter in Las Vegas around her 10th birthday a few weeks ago. We had many chickens in Thailand and she had grown attached to some, even raising hen Clover and later four baby chicks whose mother hen mysteriously disappeared and was likely killed. My daughter liked digging for grubs with the chickens and the young ones she was raising followed her as though she was their own mother. A little before we left we went through a period where no baby chicks were born for a very long time, something that concerned us so much that we bought an incubator and tried to put a few fertilized eggs in there. We successfully hatched one chick, Sunday, who is hopefully still alive and well in the Land of Smiles.

Sunday is the golden chick with the stripe on the left. The other chick was hatched from a neighbor’s house.

Eliza with Clover the hen in Phuket

And then we left Thailand and came back to our house in Las Vegas where my mother and the roommate had been staying this whole time. We came back to the same shi tzu dog Max and Mom’s 18 year old cat Dolly and our little jerk spitfire from a honeystand in Arkansas calico Dusky. And obviously there were no chickens here in Vegas, but then I heard a rooster crowing in our front yard one morning and remembered that we can have them here. We did before some years ago.

I was not looking for live chickens because I wanted to sell the eggs, though that is not a bad idea. They are going after the food grid and the future of humanity depends on paying a little attention to that. I just wanted them because my daughter loved them in Thailand and she is good at raising them. In Las Vegas especially during what has been an abnormally cold and wet winter there are some different concerns than there are in tropical never dropped below 62 degrees fareinheit Phuket. Oh had set up a simple doghouse for chickens in 2017 in Las Vegas with an old incandescent light bulb to provide heat to the chickens during the cold months. There was a covering on the front of the dog house but no latched door. The chickens wandered the back yard but with their clipped wings never flew over our cement walls.

We bought 3 chickens in Las Vegas in 2017: two hens and one rooster, for $20 total. This was after my husband had found and caught a white rooster wandering around in our front yard. The neighborhood has some chickens and we were apparently zoned for it. So we had four chickens total, two roosters and two hens. We also hatched some chicks, which we gave away for free to neighbors in 2017 when they grew big.

I sold our remaining four chickens in Las Vegas on Craigslist for $20 in 2018 when we were in Thailand. My mother didn’t want the hassle of cleaning after them. At first Mom had a few calls on the chickens but nobody was too serious. Then finally a Hispanic family showed up at the house with young children. The two hens and two roosters were sold.

At the time live chickens were easy to find in Las Vegas, especially on the East side of town where we are as the land heading up towards Sunrise Mountain becomes larger plots. We don’t have a large enough space on our plot here for a horse but we had one neighbor who occasionally had one in his yard and people up the hill only one or two miles away are often seen on horseback. It is entirely possible to see horses tied out in front of a beer store say even 1 or 2 miles from here. It is one of the things that reminds me that Las Vegas has an old west culture that is unique.

Finding chickens in 2023 on Craigslist turned out to be a lost cause. The prices were insane compared to times of old, with say $35 for a single nondescript rooster being around the going rate. A lot of ads disappeared quickly. A lot had very low prices listed for stock that they didn’t have. Some were for specialty chickens like Ayam Cemani (All black) which seems to go for around $50 for one live chicken. A lot of ads claimed that they were in Las Vegas but were for other areas like Pahrump and even Los Angeles suburbs. The few legitimate ads for chickens for reasonable prices often wanted you to buy the whole lot of them for several hundred dollars, say $200 for a hen with many baby chicks or $400 for several roosters and hens. The prices for live chickens in Las Vegas have at least quintupled since 2017. Hens carry a clear premium.

It’s gotten so bad that even fertilized chicken eggs in Las Vegas are selling for around $7 each. Having some experience with an incubator now I can tell you there is no guarantee that fertilized egg will turn into anything. We candled the eggs on the incubator in Thailand every night and we did make mistakes. Some chicks were developing perfectly but then we waited too long, and one hatched too early and sadly died. One just stopped moving in the shell halfway through. We successfully hatched Sunday the chick and can try again next time.

I searched Craigslist using obviously Spanish words for live chickens like kikeres and gallinita and pollitos. It made no difference on my results as most ads were already in English and Spanish. I then thought that a big competitor like Facebook Marketplace might have crowded in on the Craigslist crowd. I searched on there and found even less chickens listed in Las Vegas. Everything was for chicken coops, and chicken feed, and chicken accessories. There were a few ads for farm fresh organic chicken eggs, which were not much more expensive than going to the supermarket. I wasn’t sure where you would go to buy actual live chickens. The few in the area left are selling at a premium.

I text messaged with two people close to my area who both sounded like they had chicken breeding farms and very low prices. One never got back to me and the other apparently bred quail, not chickens, and he was legitimately selling them for the reasonable price of $12 each. I read as much as I could about raising quail as I have never done so. Unfortunately it didn’t sound like a good match for us as the baby quail are apparently very cold sensitive and must be incubated. They also are not territorial so if they fly over the fence say they will not come back. Quail are probably an excellent choice for people with space and zoning restrictions, but we weren’t set up for them. I worried ever playful Dusky the cat would gobble the little things up whole. Quail do count as regular pets even though the eggs and meat are very edible.

I checked into shi tzu dogs too. Little Max is pureblood and unaltered and considering how many tiktok and youtube videos my younger daughter has made of him, getting him a girl companion and making baby shi tzus might be cute. There are very few puppies at any price. I found a shi tzu mixed breed for the low price of $400, and there was a shi tzu breeder in LA that listed some puppies for $12, sorry they meant $1200. The only kittens listed anywhere in Las Vegas were pureblood Bengal kittens, ready to be adopted in April meaning they were just born, for the ultra low price of $4000. PetSmart had a cat in a cage which it called a kitten for adoption, but on the paperwork the cat was listed as 4 years old. The days of free kittens and free puppies signs in people’s front yards is long long long gone. There seems to be high demand and low supply of recently born animals of every type around Las Vegas.

Of course all of the puppies and kittens advertised proudly stated that the pure blood shi tzu puppy or bengal kitten would be fully vaccinated with everything. I wonder if demand is developing for unvaccinated or minimally vaccinated and unmicrochipped pets. My observation is that they live longer than the unfortunate ones that make it into shelters.

Of course I do have puppies to see. Daisy had three more little pooches and God willing I’ll get to see them after a few connecting flights to Phuket. I’m flying into a mess of a situation as there has been no electric at the bungalow since February 4. Call it a digital detox.

Wish me luck…or better yet…

Buy me a ko-fi