Quote:
Originally Posted by
Stuart77047 
Paprika (US English) is made from peppers with very low capsaicin %. That is why paprika is not hot. Almost everywhere else in the world paprika is any ground red pepper. So it can range from mild to extremely hot. It the US we break it out to things like chili powder, paprika and cayenne/red pepper. If you are going to try this you should use the hottest pepper you can find, which will probably be cayenne. Also don't worry about the hotness bothering the chickens. No bird has the receptors for capsaicin. The theory is that the plants developed capsaicin to ward off mammals. Also if you think about it, why would you have your fruit so hot that nothing would eat it if you produce fruits to help disperse seeds.
I have my doubts that this will do any good though. I don't know if parasites have these receptors either. So I think it may not affect them at all either. But you never know until you try.
If this works, just plant some cayenne peppers in your garden and feed them to the chickens.
My main hobby is growing rare peppers and tomatoes. I also read on this site that chickens are immune to caspium, so I decided to test this for myself. I gave my chickens a Ghost Chile(Bhut Jolokia) which is over 1 million Scoville Units. Let me just say this, they are not immune to caspium. Try it for yourself and you will see. They learned their lesson very fast, and they never touch my peppers. They have stipped all the leaves off a pepper plant before, but they don't mess with the fruit. The weakest pepper I grow is the Red Savina, at 500k SHU, former world record holder. Everything else I grow is hotter.
Also, Cayenne is not anywhere close to the hottest pepper you can find. Cayenne is 50k-SHU, and the University of New Mexico just broke the world record again with the Moruga Scorpion at 2 Million SHU.
