should i feed my chickens chicken for a snack some times?

[Hollywood Goats]

"Gross" is a human idea, not a chicken one. Chickens are certainly quite willing to eat their own kind under other circumstances, and they they certainly love the cooked version too.

I have not seen any trace whatsoever, in any of my pens, of it making them "aggressive", either (cooked chicken meat is totally different than raw-and-still-attached-to-living-chicken flesh, I seriously doubt they can make any connection, same as feeding cooked scrambled eggs does not lead to egg-eating)

Chickens do best with some meat protein as they are not biologically meant to be vegetarians; however, there are plenty of ways they can get it, including bugs/snails and/or freezerburned/leftover kitchen scraps of non-chicken meats.

Some people are concerned, in a roundabout speculative way, that there might exist some as-yet-unrecognized-and-unsuspected prion type disease in chickens that they could contract from eating the meat of other poultry. Personally I would chalk it up as "possible but neither probable nor something I am going to go to great lengths to worry about". But if you ARE worried about some hypothetical not-yet-observed prion disease, a la mad cow disease, then that would be a reason for not feeding poultry to poultry.

Don't know of any other good reason not to do it. Mine LOVE it. Even if I give them bones/carcasses after long boiling for soup stock, they can still get some nutrition out of it, and will pick things quite clean.

To each their own,

Pat

I agree, my chickens get cooked chicken and meat and they break the bones and eat those too.

My chickens get meat sauce leftover from dinner several times a week and real meat bit once a week. they are not aggressive or anything so I think that is a myth.

 

[Calliopia]

Oh, the other thing I do is save all pan drippings for them and they get these tossed in with their crumbles. Chickens are one of the few creatures that can make full use of fat due to their metabolisms. ... some days I wish I was a chicken.

 

[savingdogs]

Really? I have been afraid to give my chickens anything really fatty (or salty) as I was afraid it would be bad for them. I have not given them pan drippings or bacon fat or anything like that.
Aren't you worried they will become too fat, or are your chickens especially active, Calliopia?
I'm new at this chicken thing.

I do know one day I gave my chickens leftover soup which included quite a bit of onions and garlic and was too fatty so we did not care for it, but they loved it. The next day, one of my hens was really ill, acted kind of paralyzed, except having diarrhea, and she stayed that way for about two days. We were just thinking it would be best to mercy-kill her when she spontaneously recovered. Only the one acted that way but we surmised that she must have eaten more of the onions or fatty parts or whatever.

Not being sure what exactly was in the soup that made her sick, I have been afraid to give them onions, garlic or fatty things again.

It was not, however, chicken soup! I bet mine would LOVE that.

 

[freemotion]

It was not likely the fat. Egg yolks are made with a lot of fat, so they make good use of fat! When I render lard and suet, I give them all the leftover bits and they go nuts! It is very good for them.

 

[jodief100]

Not being sure what exactly was in the soup that made her sick, I have been afraid to give them onions, garlic or fatty things again.

I would recomend not feeding garlic or onions at all. It makes the eggs taste funny. I don't know what would have caused your hen to get sick. It may have been something completly unrelated to the soup.

 

[Hollywood Goats]

Mine eat onion tops and skin and the eggs don't taste like onions at all, think about why would they? the chickens saturate the nutrition from their food, poop out the waste(including colors and texture that they couldn't break down) and turn the nutrition into eggs and muscle etc. the flavor, color or texture does not get converted into eggs, which you can tell because if you feed a chicken beets the poop with be purple/pink but the egg never even has a pink tinge.

 

[patandchickens]

Some food components DO pass into the eggs in a detectible way. Two obvious examples are how hens (some, not all -- it is genetically determined) will produce fishy/odd-tasting eggs if fed excessive amounts of fish meal in their ration; and chickens with lots of access to a variety of fresh leafy green foods, e.g. free ranging chickens, produce much darker-orange yolks with different nutritional composition (lower cholesterol, etc)

So while MOST color/taste components of their food do not pass thru to the eggs, SOME do.

I am agnostic about the whole onion/garlic thing, as I would never waste good onions or garlic on the chickens LOL It may be one of those things like with fish-meal where different chickens process certain chemical compounds differently, I dunno

Pat

 

[Hollywood Goats]

Some food components DO pass into the eggs in a detectable way. Two obvious examples are how hens (some, not all -- it is genetically determined) will produce fishy/odd-tasting eggs if fed excessive amounts of fish meal in their ration; and chickens with lots of access to a variety of fresh leafy green foods, e.g. free ranging chickens, produce much darker-orange yolks with different nutritional composition (lower cholesterol, etc)

So while MOST color/taste components of their food do not pass thru to the eggs, SOME do.

I am agnostic about the whole onion/garlic thing, as I would never waste good onions or garlic on the chickens LOL It may be one of those things like with fish-meal where different chickens process certain chemical compounds differently, I dunno

Pat

I have never fed fish to my chickens so I don't know anything about that, but with the greens that is the nutrition not the flavor or color (green egg yolks would be pretty).

Although the fish taste being passed on to the yolk does make sense because of the fat levels that are totally absorbed and since the egg has lots of fats it would be used without be processed a lot.

 

[Calliopia]

Nope it doesn't bother them at all. And it's a good 1/2 - 1 cup of grease/fat at times. I don't know how to describe my set up. They free range in an enclosure. It's kind of a chicken aviary. So they can exercise when they want and be lazy when they want.

I also save chunks of fat from butchering and give them a block of that to peck at during the winter. Fat = calories = warmth.

I don't test my eggs for nutritional content but I've never gotten any strange flavors off of them after feeding the girls a hunk of fat.

 

[patandchickens]

I have never fed fish to my chickens so I don't know anything about that

It's an issue with some commercial feeds. (For some hens).

but with the greens that is the nutrition not the flavor or color (green egg yolks would be pretty).

What is the difference??? It's all just a matter of chemical compounds from the food passing into the egg. In the case of the dark orange yolks of free range chickens, it's from the carotenoids that is in the plant tissues and is absorbed into the chicken's system and put into the eggs. (More carotenoids in diet, more go into eggs).

And it IS in fact the COLOR that is transferring to the egg. That same dark orange color is present in plant tissues, just masked by the larger amount of green chlorophyll, that's why when leaves get sickly or this time of year "turn", they get yellowish-orange (among other colors -- there are other pigments involved too, and it varies among plant species). Pigment from leaves --> pigment in egg. Note of course that this is not true of ALL pigments, but it demonstrates that SOME elements of diet wind up in eggs.

Pat