It is accurate that quail should need be free-range, yes. That's just a good way to lose all of your quail.

But, they do need a flight pen, for humane husbandry. They naturally like to run around and peck things. They need space to do that. Anyone who justifies cage raised quail because they like confined space is just trying to justify a bad decision.

>It just might be that we won’t really try until we are forced to by some kind of collapse scenario or another.

This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.

That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.

I’m not knocking your experience and observation, but I wonder if there is some missing piece of information here. The woman who was interviewed on that podcast raised quail on both a farm and privately in her own space. She did try to let the quail free range first, and that was a disaster. She tried to make the coop area more open, and they became too nervous to lay. She eventually created a space that lets them feel safer from predators. She was also talking about a specific breed of domesticated quail. I don’t think she was trying to justify anything. Are we talking about the same things here?

Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about. What are you envisioning when you say that? Are you saying that, if a cage is made to allow them to do that, it would still be too big for a typical sized apartment?

I used to live somewhere where I can see wild quail running around the house every day. I remembered that they liked to hide in shrubs and overhanging trees. The mother might peak out and then run out from one cover to another, with a string of chicks following right a long. I rarely remember them flying out in the open.

>Are we talking about the same things here?

Yes. They need an enclosed, short space in which to feel safe in order to lay eggs. To be happy and well-raised animals, they need a 'flight pen' which is a soft netted topped pen for literal flight. They are birds, and they do need to exercise that ability. Further, their flight pen allows for them to exercise their natural pecking and 'hunting'.

You could absolutely keep them in a small cage. And they would be inhumanely raised creatures.

>Maybe the missing information is just how big of a cage we are talking about.

Small cage. Large flight pen. If the flight pen is a thing, then yes, it's too large for an apartment.

I can't find the sources but until 60-70 years ago almost every houshold in NY had either chicken or rabbits.

> This is 100% what I believe the case will be. We won't try anything, at scale, until forced to. The reason I live the way I do is to prepare for (what I believe to be) the inevitable change/shift in the world in the next 3-5 decades.

> That being said - mega-cities, and a majority of humans living in cities is a relatively new phenomena. I am not sure our current structure lends itself to 'local' living - that's my argument above. It takes a crap-load of space to feed a family.

It seems you have thought this out a lot more than I have and have the practical experience to boot.

I too also think there is a good chance for a change/shift in the world around the time frame you are talking about. I’ve seen people talk about different collapse scenarios, including some of the weirder ones. It is less about preparing it for myself so much as preparing it for my unborn son and any of his siblings that follow after.

Granted, in some of the post-collapse scenarios I’ve seen, the mega-cities are likely to be shell. I live in Phoenix. I see a lot of space that could be used for growing ... but there is not a lot of water out here. This summer, I started relandscaping my yard to capture the monsoon rains, but they didn’t really come this year. It was effectively a drought. Phoenix is not built as a city that could survive without A/C, let alone much of the areas are distant from the canals. The Salt River that runs through here is dried up. For longer-term, I’m looking at moving the family to Northern Arizona, where we’d have a better shot.

I’m also thinking that the scale at which to grow food is probably going to be at a village size. It would require a different family structure too. The one tech I think that would really need to survive is the internet, though perhaps not in the form that it is now (with control of the internet aggregated into a small handful of players). I think the presence of the internet is what will make the difference between regressing back to horticulture, to something that helps us move forward. But whatever that “forward” is, it won’t be the familiar status quo.

It may take a crap-load of space to feed a family ... I think though, encouraging people to try to feed something of themselves can help them prepare in some way if there is a collapse; and if there isn’t one, I think it would help a lot. One of the things that growing at least some of your own food enables (even if you can’t grow all of it in an apartment), is that it links you into the food cycle. It seeds a sense of agency for the person. It starts the development of personal self-reliance, even if it is not completely self-reliant, or that it is impossible for megacities to support. In this way, it gives a little bit of capability and confidence that, someone can realistically assess their chances while they are still living in a megacity. And who knows, such a person might come up with some creative ways to do so, even if others decide that they need to build their life elsewhere.

> The domesticated quail raised for food feels safer when they are in a confined space.

So, give them a false sense of security? ;)

Yes. And it is a specific breed of quails bred for this. Similar to how domesticated cows in the US are dumber than the ones roaming around India.

Except, even the specific breed of quail for meat still needs time to run and scratch and 'be a quail'.

It's more akin to goats than cows. They're domesticated, absolutely. But they still want to get up to something; they're not content to sit in a box and eat all day.