My chickens are eating dog poo! Is this normal????

Look at these beautiful girls.....



They were, not 2 minutes ago, fighting over a piece of dog poo. Is it normal for them to do this or is there something lacking in their diet?

send them to me , i am tired of cleaning the back yard. lol seriously, i have seen them do this. chickens will eat anything. it surprises some to find out they even eat their own.

My chickens rip through the dog poo like a high school football team at a pizza buffet. Likewise, the dog laps up the chicken turds as fast as they hit the ground. It's all rather gross but no one seems to have suffered any adverse affects and there is almost never anything to step in in the yard.

hahaha

Maybe I won't be picking up so much in my yard once my chicks are grown . My dogs think deer poop is the tastiest thing on earth so this doesn't surprise me lol

Yes, my dogs eat the chicken poo, but today is the first time I've seen the chickens eat the dog poo! Glad that it is totally normal. Gross but normal

its rabbit balls for my dogs. and then the sweet kisses they want to give. its when they roll in it it gets bad.

It would only be abnormal if they didn't eat dog poo.

On a recent trip to Amish country I sat in the truck and watched a flock of hens congregate under a buggy tongue, all the time they starred skyward in rapt expectation waiting for the horse to crap again.

Seems to me that turnabout is fair play....

newchickmomma4 said:

Look at these beautiful girls.....



They were, not 2 minutes ago, fighting over a piece of dog poo. Is it normal for them to do this or is there something lacking in their diet?

Click to expand...

Wow, I guess I'm the only one that wouldn't want my chickens catching salmonella from the dog poop. Dog food (and treats) can easily have salmonella in it (hence the large number of dog food recalls for salmonella contamination). Salmonella goes right through the dog into the dog poop. If my chickens were eating salmonella-laced dog poop, then I would risk getting salmonella every time I ate a 2-minute egg. That would bother me, unless I'd been doing it for years and never had a problem or if my dogs were "raw" eaters and didn't eat factory dog food.

It would bother me if a friend gave me eggs from her backyard chickens that were eating dog poop. I would hope she/he would let me know that the chickens that provided the eggs were dog poop eaters.

Maybe it's normal, but I'm not sure it's a great idea safety wise ... especially if little kids or folks with compromised immune systems are going to eat the eggs.

And what if the dog has worms ... will the chicken then get and harbor that kind of worms? Sure, probably not all worms that dogs get are able to live in a chicken, but what if there is just one kind that can? What if the dog's poop contains traces of heartworm medicine ... will it get in the eggs? What if the dog was just wormed and the chickens eat the dog's poop ... will that worming medicine get in the eggs?