I'm new here so... hello!
We've recently jumped into the chicken world and now have 3 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Black Sex Link chicks. They are almost a week old. We have a horse farm and raise organic vegetable gardens in Eastern NC.
We are raising our chicks in a 65 gallon aquarium in our house and have just started taking them out into the backyard for an hour a day to peck around (on warm sunny days). The flooring of the aquarium is newspaper covered in mesh screen (I read on several sites that this was best) and it is thoroughly cleaned out daily. However we find that no matter how clean we keep it, the chicks still get poop stuck to the bottoms of their feet. They try to peck it off sometimes.
My question is, should we be cleaning it off? And if so, how?? Otherwise they are clean...
Thanks for any tips!
--kb
We've recently jumped into the chicken world and now have 3 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Black Sex Link chicks. They are almost a week old. We have a horse farm and raise organic vegetable gardens in Eastern NC.
We are raising our chicks in a 65 gallon aquarium in our house and have just started taking them out into the backyard for an hour a day to peck around (on warm sunny days). The flooring of the aquarium is newspaper covered in mesh screen (I read on several sites that this was best) and it is thoroughly cleaned out daily. However we find that no matter how clean we keep it, the chicks still get poop stuck to the bottoms of their feet. They try to peck it off sometimes.
My question is, should we be cleaning it off? And if so, how?? Otherwise they are clean...
Thanks for any tips!
--kb