rice

ok not sure where I should actually post this underfeeding under emergencies under general questions etc so here I posted.

I've been making Christmas snowmen and what you do is you feel socks full of rice and then tie them off and decorate. anyways I had a big bag of rice it was a ziplock bag I was using while I was filling up the socks and I locked it said it on the ground next to my bed. My chickens come in my room cuz I have learned how to use the doggie door. They were packing up the bag and I just laughed and thought to myself how do you keep chickens busy for an hour you put rice in a bag and put it on the floor. I was not aware that they actually got the plastic apart and was eating the raw rice it was brown rice not white rice if that makes a difference. But somewhere I read that raw rice is fatal to chickens but they been doing this for a while and I've been working on this for about 4 or 5 days ago I did the rice part and put the bag on the floor and haven't really touched. All my chicken seem to be acting fine pooping find everything seems to be normal but I just don't know how deadly are toxic raw rice is for chickens. any help would be appreciated

I hope it is not fatal. I give my chickens rice all the time. They really like it. Maybe they mean in large quantities?

Un cooked rice I was told is lethal two chickens

No more lethal than any other grain in moderation. I could see how it might be an issue if they were allowed to gorge on it. But, in moderation, it would be just like any other grain.

Folks will swear blind if you feed a bird uncooked rice it will swell up inside them and cause a horrible death. Not true, but the rumor persists. I'm sure rice farmers wish it were true, they'd lose a lot less of their crop to birds.

Thank you

I would let them play with the snowmen when you were done with them!

I think where that wild rumor started was rice thrown at weddings. They started asking you to not throw rice at weddings. The urban legend developed that the wild birds would eat the rice and explode. Not really. The danger was that the hard rice makes a solid surface slippery. The danger was that someone would slip and fall down, not that birds would explode. When weddings take place on dirt or a lawn instead of wood or concrete, the ground does not get slippery if rice is thrown.

There is nothing lethal in rice. Any dried grain will swell up when it gets wet, weed seeds, grass seeds, any dried seeds. But the birds can handle that. Dried seeds are a natural feed for birds.

That is very cute! Koda is my male German shepherd's name. His ancestors are all Czechoslovakian imports and Carpathian wolves. He would not have that toy for long...