Banished Chicken problem

Question

First, I know I am late to the game but I have been searching online and found no answers to this question and I thank you for the replies (:

So, the problem is I bought 6 chickens and none are reproducing or giving eggs. I left them in the trade post for a lil bit ( not more than a year) Then put them in a pen big enough for 10 with 1 herder. Slowly over the course of few years they have been dieing off and not producing eggs. I now have 3. Disasters off.

Answer 1

It could have different reasons for this.

1. Do you have a herdsman? And if so, do you have assigned him to the pasture? If not, your animals may die over time.
2. It could be a bug in the game. Do you use the newest version? I had a bug in an older version which is a bit like that. The animals had enough space but won't be moved from the trader to the pasture. Which means they died in the tradepost. It was fixed later on.
3. If you have a herdsman and he is assigned to it. You can check the roads he needs to walk. It could be that your herdsman has a very bad road which means he walks (in fact) months to your pasture, do his job and walk back again. It is not likely, but I may still occur that the pathfinding isn't that good.
4. If your pasture has a herdsman, which is near to the pasture, all your animals are moved to the pasture and the counter in the pasture shows that those animals are really in the pasture. You may want to build another pasture and try to "split" the herd. Which means the half of it will walk to another pasture. Maybe this will fix the bug and your error is gone.

Hopefully this will help you. Normally I would think 1-3 may be a good reason for it. 4 is just a bugfix if the game stutters (which may occur).

Answer 2

Ionic's answers are certainly things to check, but one additional think to check is to make sure your slider for how many animals you want to have in the pasture is set appropriately. Your herdsmen will slaughter any animals above what the slider is set for.