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z3lda3
Songster
- Mar 24, 2024
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Well that’s a lot of information! Did you know uncooked green beans are toxic to chickens? And Apple seeds, and apparently alcohol is a no no too. And chocolate which I think is just sad.When they are in a store, or come directly from a hatchery, "assorted mix" usually means the hatchery put the last few of each breed into one box and called them assorted. One chick may be a Cochin and another may be a Brahma, but there will probably not be an Cochin/Brahma mixes. Sometimes there will be specific assortments: just bantams, or just chickens with feathered feet, or just chickens that lay brown eggs, or something like that.
You say avocado means certain death to a chicken eats it? What is your source for that? It is certainly stated on many websites, but as far as I can tell, they are just plain WRONG.
My main source for doubting it: many chickens that have eaten avocado and been perfectly healthy. They did not eat the pit, and they ate little or none of the peel, but they ate the same part of the avocado that people would eat. If the avocado had ugly brown streaks inside, sometimes the entire avocado went to the chickens and they ate it right up (number of chickens ranged from about 6 to 20 at various times.)
Here is a post on this website, from someone with more extensive experience than I have:
And if you want a source that isn't just personal experience, here is Purina's view:
https://www.purinamills.com/chicken...eed-chickens-chicken-treats-to-feed-and-avoid
"Avocado pits and skins are toxic to chickens as they contain a toxin called persin. The flesh of the avocado is fine for chickens."
(Purina is in the business of selling animal feed, which means they want your chickens alive so you buy more feed. They do not sell avocados. So if there is any conflict of interest, they should be telling you to avoid anything even remotely dangerous.)
https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/20133426489
And here is a scientific study that included avocado meal as an ingredient in chicken feed, with that feed used for broiler chicks during a 4 week period (age 14 days to 42 days). Since it was mixed into the feed, they had no choice about eating it. The experiment included several different levels of avocado meal, with the highest being 29.3% of the total feed. (Yes, almost 1/3 of the feed was avocado meal, for 28 days.)
The results include the statement that none of the chicks died during the experiment. I repeat, NONE of them died. The researchers did find that the fastest-growing chicks were the ones with no avocado meal in their food. The toxin Persin was mentioned as one possible reason for this. But despite that, all of the chicks did live and did grow, some of them with very large amounts of avocado meal in their food for 4 weeks.
As for what the "avocado meal" is, the paper says: "After the oil has been extracted from avocado fruits that were unsuitable for the fresh fruit market, a product, avocado meal (AM), remains as a waste product"
If the link doesn't work, here is the header of the paper, so you can try to find it by googling:
Applied Animal Husbandry & Rural Development 2013, Volume 6 22
Can avocado meal replace maize meal in broiler diets?
J.B.J. van Ryssen, A. Skenjana & W.A. van Niekerk
Animal & Wildlife Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa
So I contend that your statement "It's probably the most lethal thing for chickens besides swallowing foreign material. This image is absolutely awful because if a chicken-keeper relied on this source and this source solely, then that means certain death" is NOT true of avocados. Plenty of chickens have eaten avocado, in various quantities, without dying from it.