2 week olds and day old chicks together?

[Chickennovice74]

Unfortunately, our 8 year old son accidentally left the lid off of the brooder this past weekend and our greyhound got 2 of our chicks and killed them. We have 5 more that are fine. We are planning on getting 3 new chicks to replace those that were killed. They should be arriving next Tuesday when our current chicks are 2 1/2 weeks old. Our plan was to divide the brooder for a few days to let the new chicks get settled and then allow them together, supervised initially. We use a heat plate for our heat source and the current chicks only sleep on top of it, so we were planning to allow the new ones access to underneath and the older ones access to the top initially. Also, the current chicks use a nipple waterer but we planned on giving the new ones the traditional waterer to start. The current chicks used the traditional waterer for their first week before switching to the nipple waterer. Does this sound like a reasonable plan? From what I have been reading, it would be better to introduce the new chicks sooner rather than later, but we don't want them to get overrun by the larger chicks. At thoughts appreciated.

 

[SIMZ]

Sorry about your dog and the chicks.

This can work. I find that mixing chicks works even better with the heat plate. Since the little ones spend more time under there the bigger ones aren't tempted to pick on them as much. I wouldn't even separate unless you see a problem. Just keep a very close eye on them. The bigger ones will show your little ones "the ropes". The only problem you may run into is that there will be many more bigger than little chicks.

 

[Justy59]

I did that and it worked out for me.