Why I Can't Be President - Reason #2

They won't let me raise chickens on the White House lawn.

I have this 'thing' about store bought chicken. The chicken you buy at your local grocery store does not resemble MY chickens in any way.
It's too small to be fully grown.
They feed the chickens marigold seeds to make them yellow. (the only thing yellow on a dead chicken is the feet and the beak)
Sometimes the bones are broken, and you can tell by the bruising that it was done before they died.
The gizzard, heart, and liver did not come from THAT exact chicken.
I can see the bird flu hitting the US poultry industry pretty hard. That's because they use no common sense when raising chickens.
The industrial chickens never get to play in the sun.
The mass chicken farmers know nothing about the health of a chicken, they treat them all like rats.
MY chickens get hatched, then kept warm in a box on top of the refrigerator (that's the BEST place to keep your little biddies.) I take them out and let them play in the grass. Yes, herding little chicks is fun, I usually assign a kid to do it. My mortality rate is very low.
Then, when they are big enough, I move them to their nesting place. Their collective size determines what kind of nesting place I move them to. Usually I put the group in a rabbit hutch with a ramp for a month before sending them into the coop.
On pretty days, I open the door and let them out for the day. When it gets dark, they will ALL return to their nesting place. (and people think chickens aren't smart)
When they get their adult feathers, I can start culling them based on their attitudes, or habits.
A bad chicken will:
Pick on the speckled chickens.
Get all up in my face when I go to feed them.
Have an unnatural pink around their eyes (that means they eat eggs)
Have small combs (they don't build up enough blood pressure like my good laying hens)
A rooster who is too rough on my hens and tears up their feathers.
Of course you will want to cull out the roosters first. You only want one (maybe two) or they will wear the hens out.
Besides giving them an outdoor pen to play in, it is helpful to let them out completely on days that you will be home. Like on the weekends, or after you have harvested. They get to peck around and eat bugs and fallen tomatoes and such.
Feed: I give my laying hens some laying mash, cracked oyster shells for calcium, and good old sand for their gizzards. My young chickens make do with cracked corn and sand.
As a result: My chickens are BIG, healthy, beautiful, and happy, and my incidence of double-yolk eggs are very high.
Years ago, when I was fresh-off-the-farm, I went to the grocery store to get some chicken leg quarters. The only chicken I could find was frozen, jaundiced, yellow looking crap. I called the butcher out. I said, "Don't you have any FRESH chicken?" (because fresh isn't frozen), he said "Technically, ma'am, this is fresh, because it's quick-frozen, which means it's not frozen all the way through." I grabbed that package of chicken and started beating it against the edge of the freezer and said "If this ain't frozen, I'll kiss your ass." I told him that I don't know what he fed his family, but I wasn't feeding this jaundiced yellow baby leg chicken to MY family. He called the manager. I had a come-a-part and was yelling at the both of them. The manager asked the butcher to go see what they have in the back. He put me together a package of chicken that looked slightly better than the one I was having a fit over, but at least it wasn't frozen. I was temporarily sated, and I bought my chicken and left.
When I look at store bought chicken, it breaks my heart. These chickens aren't big enough to even have grown all their adult feathers. The incidence of broken bones is about 1:3, and I'm still bugged out by the giblets. I want the gizzard that came with THAT chicken.
So if I were President, I would still want to raise my own chickens. Build a Presidential chicken coop right on the White House lawn. Start my brood right on top of the Presidential refrigerator, and serve big baked chickens for Presidential dinners. Everybody would think they were turkeys, only better and without those annoying tendons.
I'll only be President if they will let me do this.
MsAmber