Dustbath Question

[IHeartCapnHook]

Do chicken instinctively know how to dust bathe themselves? I have a large plastic bin (you know the kind that go under your bed with wheels and lid) full of play sand for my girls to dust bathe in. I take the lid off the sandbox and the first thing they all do is come running and eat the sand? I have only seen one chicken actually doing the dust bath in there. Nobody seems to ever want to get clean? I see my neighbors chickens always playing in their sandbox, but mine never seem to?

Is there something I can do to encourage them? Are they squeeky clean chicken and not need cleaning?

 

[Poulets De Cajun]

I had to put mine IN the sandbox that I built them and kinda swish it around. They got the idea after a while...

 

[EricShane]

mine dust bath on one of the old barn floors, they love it!

 

[OrpingtonManor]

I didn't teach them, because I was new to chickens. They just knew. I got them as baby chicks, so it's instinctive. They scratched a little dent in the ground, then layed on their sides and kicked like crazy. What a mess! The hole got bigger. The girls got dirtier. The girls got bigger. The hole got bigger. The girls got dirtier. Well, you get the idea.

 

[Foxhound lady]

We put ours out when they were a few weeks old and they started dust bathing themselves.

 

[cimarron]

i use a mixture of sand, regular dirt and old fireplace ashes (now if i could only figure out how to put those empty coffee cans to use...!) for the bath. they seem to love it. i keep making the tub bigger but it's never big enough. a chicken dust bathing is a great sight the first time. once you get over the shock of them writing around. and figure out that they're not in their death throes but a state of pure chicken ecstasy.

it's ok if they're eating the sand. .that's their grit for digestion.

 

[gritsar]

Mine found a dirt pile on one of their first trips outside. They were two and half weeks old at the time. They figured it out real quick, all on their own.

 

[joebryant]

Put lots of peat moss, dirt, and ashes in with your sand, and stand back and watch.

 

[alagary]

Would it be okay to add Sevin Dust in the holes where the bathe ?

 

[RedHead]

Would it be okay to add Sevin Dust in the holes where the bathe ?

I'm pretty sure Sevin Dust is not a good idea. I'd just go with some food grade DE​