We raise ducks as well and the effort involved is definitely not huge if you have the space (although you a spending a lot less than us per duck). Just keeping them for eggs is very simple and has a lot of upside... best quality eggs available, nice yard art, fun for kids, life/death lessons for kids, etc. I have been thinking a lot about how much meat my family eats recently and nothing helped put that into sharper focus than starting to butcher some of our own animals. Whereas keeping poultry in order to gather a family's worth of eggs is pretty simple, the idea of producing all our own meat is really a tall order. We eat at least one full chicken a week, and those are pretty big. It would take at least two ducks to supplement that one fat chicken and even then we are eating a lot of other meat. We ended up buying half a cow from a friend and that goes a lot further.

On butchering side of things, raising around 100 birds a year for slaughter would be crazy for us. Going from a full vegan lifestyle a few years back to slaughtering and butchering some of our own food has been an interesting change. I would recommend it if you have second guessed any of the weirdness with how food makes it to your plate. It definitely gives you something to think about. Killing really cute ducks that we raised by hand was definitely tough in the beginning. I had never hunted or killed any animal on purpose before. It's always a bummer but it does get a little easier in time. We've got a bunch of our eggs in our incubator now, hoping for more ducks in 24 days!