YUCK! How do I stop my chick from eating poop?

[hisbride]

all I can say is ewwwww. I was not too please to see this when ours were chicks. It is impossible to clean up after each poo so I had to just leave the room for a few hours and then put down new newspaper. Now eating dog poo now that is gross. I hope giving mine grapes and such will help them be a little finicky and they won't pick up that habit.

 

[silkiechicken]

Quote:
Man I want the many piles of chicken poo to just go poof at night!

As for eating poo... maybe they saw pieces of undigested corn in it. I find that chicks all experiment with the poo thing when they are little but grow up and learn its no good to eat and wipe their beaks off everywhere when they get a taste of it.

Edit: Oh. Just four. I get that many within the first 30 seconds of letting the chickens out about 200 feet from the porch. End up with at least 40 by the end of the day! EEK!

 

[thndrdancr]

Yea, I kind of thought it was nice the chicken poo just disappeared too!

Wished it would happen in their pen...poof gone!

 

[Chickimmie]

i noticed mine have been doing it lately. i am a first time chicken lady as of April this year, and they get a good diet of grubblies and fresh greens and cabbage and fermented grains twice a day plus dried grains (corn, oats, wheat, BOSS, milo, quinoa.) and i feed the shell back to them plus oyster shell and sea kelp and nutritional yeast flakes. so dunno what is missing in their diet to make them do this. i guess its not unusual. They eat like pigs and act like they are starving every time i poke my head out the back door. They are greedy

 

[Kiki]

i noticed mine have been doing it lately. i am a first time chicken lady as of April this year, and they get a good diet of grubblies and fresh greens and cabbage and fermented grains twice a day plus dried grains (corn, oats, wheat, BOSS, milo, quinoa.) and i feed the shell back to them plus oyster shell and sea kelp and nutritional yeast flakes. so dunno what is missing in their diet to make them do this. i guess its not unusual. They eat like pigs and act like they are starving every time i poke my head out the back door. They are greedy

Do you not feed your chickens a complete balanced poultry feed? Are you feeding all of the above instead of a balanced commercially made feed?

 

[SweetPea8505]

I just got my first round of chicks on the 9th and there are a couple of them who eat the others poo. I got 6 females. It's gross but seems to be of no concern.

 

[thistlewick]

The purpose of chickens in rotational grazing is to have the chickens come in after the grass eaters (you move them to the next pasture, the chickens come in after) and they check all the poops for grubs, scratching the poop and spreading it, fertilizing in the process, and keep the bug population down quite perfectly.

We have a chicken tractor for just this reason and will move the coop around to different parts of the pasture because this is simply natural for chickens to do

 

[Perris]

I just got my first round of chicks on the 9th and there are a couple of them who eat the others poo. I got 6 females. It's gross but seems to be of no concern.

It's entirely natural. Think of it as a fecal transplant. They're growing their microbiomes.