Dirty, DISGUSTING flooring for my new babies.

[LeeLeesFarm]

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I have had my baby chicks for one week now .... from IDEAL, btw ... all healthy and beautiful.

QUESTION:

I have them in a large cage, with bath towels as their flooring.

As they are getting slightly larger, it seems the towels are getting SO filthy dirty, even just over night.

They are only 1 week old now so this seems like it is going to be a huge problem as they get bigger, I'm thinking (bigger droppings).


Do the nice, soft bath towels need to come out?
Is it unhealthy for them to live in / sleep on so many droppings (12 babies now)?

If I must have pine shavings, how often do you have to change that?
Will they eat pine shavings at 1 week old ... they do seem to want to eat / peck at everything they see.


Thanks for input.
Lee

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[LynneP]

I'm using pine shavings and I find that with a kitty litter tool I can clean out part of the brooder daily. It smells nice and clean even though my chicks are hitting Day 11. I find that the area around the water dispenser is the dirtiest and I keep about 4 layers of paper towel under it, and I clean under and around the food dispenser twice a day and that seems to work well.

Yes, I'd get the towels out, though it's very thoughtful of you!

 

[CarriBrown]

Uh oh! Well, what you can do is take out the towels, put in pine shavings (NO CEDAR!) and then put paper towels on top. You can take the paper towels out at about two weeks, exposing the shavings. Make sure they don't eat the shavings. They will peck at them and check them out, but as long as they know what their food is, they will be ok.
I changed the paper towels a lot. The shavings can be changed once a day, maybe once every two days, depending on the size of the area and amount of chicks.

 

[LeeLeesFarm]

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thanks for the help !!

I think I was really trying to keep expenses down, #1
and the softness of clean, fresh bath towels looks so comfy for them, #2

Well....
off to the pet store today ....
as nice as clean bath towels look, it sure looks crusty and disgusting after a couple hrs !!!

Lee

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[dangerouschicken]

They won't eat the pine shavings, though they may carry them around in their mouths playing tag

I cleaned the whole brooder out once a week while they were babies, and that seemed to work. You can just add more pine shavings utilizing the deep litter method .

 

[LeeLeesFarm]

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Quote:
Hooray !!!

:
Now we're talking

Lee


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[kaylakala]

Mine loved to wallow in the pine when they were tiny!

 

[Wildsky]

Yeah use the shavings, the poop will go down to the bottom and they won't be walking in it.

When my babies were 7-8 weeks I was changing the pine every two days

 

[Linda in San Diego]

In four weeks, I changed the litter in the bottom of the box at two weeks and then on week 4 they were in the run and coop. I just added more pine shavings/litter about every other day and stirred it all up well. Now that they are in their coop, I have done basically the same thing. In fact just got back in from stirring up the shavings in the coop and the fresh pine smell is still with me. Maybe because a few shavings are stil stuck to me, LOL. But overall it is looking good as I am trying to use the deep litter method here.

 

[Wildsky]

Yeah in california - BOOT em out at 4 weeks! Its warm enough!