AUSTRALIAN POULTRY FORUM™

Very good you put this information for all us novices as its something you don't consider when you first start out. I wouldn't have thought people would steal chooks but I realize now they do. Thank you to all who put this together you have saved me the drama of losing my birds

It is especially important for anyone with the hard to get fowl that can fetch good money I never tell anyone were I live I meet them away from my home which I have done 3 times and all 3 buyers understood why. I have Red Anconas and they are hard to come by I think I am the only one with them now on the west coast so I need to be very careful. I never give out my home number only my repaid mobile number and I use a hotmail email for any for sales so I cover all bases. I know a few people that have had fowl stolen because they let a buyer come to their home and for me that is a big mistake

I am with you RedAnconasWA there is no way anyone come here I meet them at my sisters house as she has no birds

I am sure that everyone that has posted here to help others is glad that this post is achieving the intended purpose

all ideas and thougths if put here can be considered and each can then form their own plan for security

so may I say - thank you - to everyone and keep the ideas and thoughts coming

this is why i have animals and not people in my life!!!!and a big gun!!

I like that and in any ways I am the same people tend to let me down but my animal friends don't

Just watch farmstock and petlink if you advertise a wanted birds you may get emails from cameroon or nigeria

I'm another who strongly supports microchipping.

Having chipped thousands of fish, amphibians, birds and mammals for my various jobs in biological sciences, I can attest that it is a simple and a safe procedure, and not onerously difficult (apologies to any vets reading this). Even if individuals are not confident about doing it, local clubs could easily train members to chip birds, and it surprises me that there is not yet a coordinated national scheme to register chipped birds. I'll certainly be chipping my new birds in the near future - overall costs will come to less than $5 per bird; well worth the price.

Some words of advice to those who chip...

1) Scan the chip before injecting (point the scanner down the needle, if need be), to check that it works.
2) Always scan a bird several times to make sure that it hasn't been chipped before; or for already-chipped birds, to check that it does not in fact have more than one chip.
3) If someone else has chipped a stolen bird, you might get their chips on the first few passes, so scanning from different directions is a good idea.
4) There are preferred places in which to inject the chip, but don't tell other people exactly where your chips are placed.
5) If you're not confident about chipping so that the chip doesn't fall out, a drop of superglue will fix the injection point nicely.
6) Scan your bird again immediately after chipping it, to make sure that things are as they should be.
7) Make sure - using legal contracts if necessary - that anyone who buys your birds registers with the database keeper, and that they pass on this requirement to subsequent purchasers.
8.) Once your birds die, consider donating the chips to your local uni biology department - I know that we spent thousands each year on the buggers, and it would have been wonderful to get someone else's seconds for fieldwork - most ecologists run on the smell of an oily rag.

I'll also be keeping my own library of genetic material, using pin feathers, and cross-referenced with the chips. Again, it is cheap and easy, and a boon both for security and for possible future pedigree research.

On the matter of using email addresses in advertisements, consider using an application such as Yahoo that allows you to create aliases. This way you can use 'disposable' addies for one underlying address, and ditch an alias for a new one if you are spammed or have other security issues.

Too easy!

Heh, just noticed - that shifty-looking smiley in front of my comment about dead chooks isn't supposed to be leering at the thought of mortality, it's supposed to be an '8' followed by a parenthesis.

Being a newbie I don't have edit capacity, so I can't fix it!