Chicken

Chickens can not be found in the wild; they must be bought from a merchant or join the colony in a self-taming event. Hens will happily lay unfertilized eggs without a rooster or they can be bred to start chicken farming. Chickens grow extremely fast, taking just over one season from being laid to full maturity.

Chickens are some of the fastest reproducing animals in the game so ~~some~~ extreme care must be taken to keep chicken populations under control or you'll quickly find your colony in a chicksplosion. It is easy for a dozen hens and a rooster to quickly produce hundreds of chicks, and although individual chicks are easy to maintain, a sudden surge can quickly overwhelm your food supply and your CPU. Chicken feed is accomplished by growing haygrass, though handling large farms will be taxing on hauling labor without the help of trained dogs - or bears (or Thrumbos if that's your style, although half of your haygrass field would be ruthlessly devoured before actually being hauled) as Haygrass stacks up to 200. Alternatively, you can just let them forage in the wild, though this leaves them vulnerable to predators.

A clutch of freshly hatched chickens can be slaughtered for a modest amount of meat or sold to merchants as a Ludeonicrous source of income.

Keep your chickens far from Foxes and Cobras because they usually hunt them. Or don't. It doesn't really matter because the losses are quickly replenished.

Training

Chickens lack the intelligence for training. You can, however, make battle chickens by using animal areas to create choke points for your enemies.

This animal can be trained as follows:

Guard:
Attack:
Rescue:
Haul:

*As of version 1.1.2610, all animals can be tamed. The percentage of likelihood of success depends on factors such as the Animals Wildness Percentage, Pawn Handling Skill, and others. More information can be found on the animals page.

Livestock

Keeping chickens as livestock is extremely hard, but extremely rewarding if you can control it. If you have a pair of chickens ready to start mating, in about 1 season your meat shortage will simply vanish. As chickens are living example of the nature of exponential growth; if you do not keep your chicken population under control, your CPU, all 5 of your display screens, and all nearby electronics will spontaneously combust.

Feeding

Three chickens can be sustained on ten tiles of Haygrass.

Chickens eat three times a day: 2 hay for lunch, 2 hay for dinner and 4 hay for breakfast. So 8 hay every day that goes by waiting for crops to grow.
Haygrass grows in 5 days worth of daylight, or 10 days with nights at 100% fertility. And each haygrass produces 24 hay when it matures.
So in ten days a chicken will eat 10 days x 8 hay/day = 80 hay.
If we have three chickens then 3 chickens x 80 hay/cycle = 240 hay/cycle.
And if we have ten haygrass then it will produce 10 haygrass x 24 hay/cycle = 240 hay/cycle.

This does not take into account the exponential nature of chicken breeding; if you have at least 1 chicken from each gender locked in your outdoor pasture, soon in-bred chickens will swarm the map, stripping the land bare of any living plant (except trees) they can find.

Note that due to their small body size, chickens will eat a lot more grass than they need on paper. This is especially pronounced in the younger life stages, so even if you don't have enough hay or kibble to feed all of your chickens, you should prioritize feeding the chicks with your foodstocks and only let the adults graze. The reason is that all pawns have a maximum nutrition capacity(visible on the needs tab) based on their body size, but the same hunger rate across all life stages. Currently, a baby chick can have 0.07 nutrition and will try to eat around the 50% mark. If they eat grass (normally worth 0.15 nutrition) they'll end up consuming all of it but only receive the .035 to 0.04 nutrition that they're missing, with the rest wasted. Given their capacity and their hunger rate, chicks actually have to eat 6 or 7 times a day(making their hunger rate functionally closer to 1.0 when eating grass), while a hen or rooster would only eat about 3 grass (0.45 nutrition) per day. Feeding them hay or vegetables instead will largely eliminate this inefficiency.