Can chickens eat tomatoes?

[greathorse]

Quote:
Actually not a stupid question- there are lots of plants that one species (or even sub-species) can eat while another will either get really sick or die by eating it. Then you gotta factor in the reason why the mockingbird didn't eat the whole tomato (unknown). And then there are parrots who eat poisonous seeds all the time but eat clay to counteract the poisons:

http://www.eparrots.biz/chow.html

I don't know if mockingbirds do this or not, but just pointing out that the question wasn't stupid......

I have asked this board on several occasions to give me one instance where one chicken at any time ever ate a plant or a vegetable or fruit with any noticable ill effect ever. I have never had anyone respond that it happened.

I am not saying it is a stupid question I just simply cant wrap my brain around why a bird would get ill from eating a vegetable of any kind ever.

Just saying

I am guessing the tomato was bigger than the mockingbird likely why it wouldnt eat the whole thing

 

[woodmort]

Quote:
Yup, that about sums it up. I haven't had any "volunteer" tomato plants come up since I've allowed my chickens to glean the garden in the fall--they get everything.

 

[OrloffTom]

I'd have to admit that mine love tomatoes as well lol. They get all the ones that don't make it to the kitchen and as a previous poster said, they do love watermelon! Mine will devour one

.

 

[dieselgrl48]

Mine love them.We give left over's or blinky one's with No problem's ever.

 

[CoyoteMagic]

I'm a firm believer that chickens won't eat anything that is going to kill them. My crazy thing have stuck their heads in a can of laytex paint which is supposedly very harmful to them. You can't tell by the x-large eggs they are still laying 2 years later.

 

[greathorse]

I think they can and will eat things that kill them, but it wont be a vegetabel

 

[Chris09]

Well for the past 6 years my chickens have ate the pulp left over from putting the tomatoes through the food mill during canning season and I haven't had a get sick from it.. ( I would say a good 5 gallons of pulp a year)

Chris

 

[nanawendy]

My girls sometimes eat grape toms to fast... Now I cut them in half. One of them kind of got a tom stuck in her throat... and honked until it went down. It sounded funny but I was scared, I thought.."what a way to go"

 

[CoyoteMagic]

deleted

 

[KCNC06]

My "little" girls (this spring's chicks) have recently discovered my roma tomatoes. They have done such a great job eating bugs and spiders out of the garden this year. My aunt warned me that her chickens always destroyed her garden, either eating leaves or vegetables or scratching them to pieces. I was bragging about how good my girls were...I kept seeing them peeking under the leaves gently pecking the bugs off the leaves. Then last week I caught one of the girls eating a red tomato! When I started towards her to get her away from the tomato plant, she just picked her tomato up in her beak and took off running. Later I saw her looking around at the other plants and she decided to take a peck of a very ripe jalapeno pepper. It looked like she liked it about as much as I would have expected, she took off out of the garden and I haven't seen her back in there again.