Students insist there's nothing poultry about their chooks - Sydney Morning Herald

Pampered: Carly Vanden Dool, Emma Longworth, Anna Wilmshurst, Stephanie Williams and Emily Wilmshurst with the survivors. Photo: Wolter Peeters

Getting too attached to a chook is risky. That's one of the lessons learnt by students at Muirfield High School in Sydney's north-west who for the first time are entering the Royal Easter Show's egg-laying and chicken-meat competitions for schools. Of the eight egg-laying pullets they received in November as eight-week-old chicks, only five remain: Comet, Cupid, Blixen, Prancer and Rudolph.

The other three were killed by foxes at the school. When the meat chickens arrived, they were given numbers and not names because they will be slaughtered - and the quality of meat judged - at the show.

''We didn't want to get too attached,'' Emma Longworth 14, a year 10 student, said of the broilers. She said the students had learnt the differences between the two types of chickens and seen how genetics had played a role.

The meat chickens - on a hormone-free diet - had grown from newly hatched chicks to an average of two kilograms in 42 days while the egg layers had grown more slowly, now averaging 1.5 kilograms. Carly Vanden Dool, 15, said the most interesting thing had been watching the broilers grow and develop, ''and seeing the stages from the cute little fluffy chickens to these ugly white fully grown chickens. Every day when we came in to check on them, feed and weigh them, we could notice a difference. They started getting adult feathers, and they started losing their baby fluff. It was really amazing how fast they grew.''

Both competitions are designed to interest students in the two sides of the poultry industry, and to teach genetics and animal husbandry, said Kerry Pearce, the co-ordinator of the poultry and pigeon competitions at the show.

He said it was up to the students to decide what to feed the chickens, whether to let them be free range, and to weigh, monitor and record changes daily. At the show, the students will present their three best pullets, with feathers washed and blow-dried to professional show standards. These chickens' eggs will be judged for uniformity of size, shape and weight.