Do Not Use Crushed Granite!!!

[Shadrach]

I'm having difficulty in understanding crop related issues due to grit consumption. The majority of the grit a chicken ingests goes straight down through the proventriculus and into the gizzard. There aren't any muscles surrounding the crop to round sharp edges off, nor the same type of relatively puncture proof lining the gizzard has.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

I do that for chicks in order to put the grit right in front of them, while preventing them from gorging on it because there's been multiple stories on here about chicks gorging on grit when given a whole dish of it. I've seen stories about adults doing that as well but it's far more uncommon, and perhaps that's what happened to the OP's bird.

Looking at their photo of what's in the bag I don't see either see granite or oyster shell - since you ferment it, have you tried watering it down a bit more and seeing what filters out? I'm really curious since it is listed.

No, I haven’t, but that’s an interesting thought! I’ll give it a try. My only filters are coffee filters, but we’ll see what happens.

- they do have a packed dirt floor under 5-6” of deep litter, and they dig all the way down and do a lot of pecking, so they’re probably getting grit that way. Also in the daily dirt baths, I would think.

Once we get the gaps under the backyard fence patched, we’ll let them out with supervision to roam. Lord knows that there are enough weed seeds waiting for them.

 

[K0k0shka]

Makes sense!

I will point out, however, that this is a whole grain feed and not pre-ground. (I do ferment it for separate reasons.) And I would hope that they wouldn’t add oyster shell to chick feed.

View attachment 4089629

But I agree that for pellet and crumble feeds, (digestive) grit wouldn’t make sense.

The feeds with larger particles, especially particles of different colors, shapes, and sizes, are more likely to confuse the chickens and lead them to eat too much actual grit if it were to be mixed with the feed. The grit stones would stand out and be more obvious in a feed that's otherwise uniform in color and consistency, like, say, crumble. So the chicken can see them and avoid them. But when it's a mixed pile of diverse particles like this, it would be much harder to see what's a stone and what's not. They'd gobble the whole pile up, especially if it's fermented and clumping and they eat a whole clump as opposed to picking out individual pieces. I have no idea what the ingredient "grit" actually is in this particular feed though, maybe you can contact the company and ask? I'm just inherently skeptical of anybody who tells me chickens are smart and can watch out for themselves, because they do for a fact eat styrofoam, screws, plastic and all kinds of other junk they supposedly should know not to eat, and yet, they do...

I'm having difficulty in understanding crop related issues due to grit consumption. The majority of the grit a chicken ingests goes straight down through the proventriculus and into the gizzard. There aren't any muscles surrounding the crop to round sharp edges off, nor the same type of relatively puncture proof lining the gizzard has.

In the normal course of events, chickens eat very very small amounts of grit, and they eat it infrequently, because it lasts so long in their gizzards. So they'd eat a stone here and there, and it passes through the crop and down on to the gizzard without issue. But if they were eating a large amount quickly, like if it was mixed with feed and they couldn't tell, or ate too quickly and didn't bother inspecting every piece, then a larger amount of grit would pile up in the crop and cause a blockage. Grit particles don't slide past each other easily, because they are rough and have so many facets. They clump and kind of get stuck locked together, making it hard to siphon them through the narrow passage out of the crop (especially since chickens can't swallow like we do, to force the food down via muscles, but rather rely on gravity for that). So the issue with large amounts of grit is that it can cause crop impaction that is often impossible to resolve without surgery, and can lead to death.

 

[Chicken_tiger_catt]

Yeah that bothers us too, so we call them juveniles, shortened to "Juvies" since they start to act naughty in the teenage phase, tipping over feeders, pooping in the water, flying into their friends, digging holes to china, etc. With their feathers sticking out awkwardly as they grow in, lol.
So we lock them behind HW Cloth bars in Juvie detention.

heh. I call them "trash children" because their feathers look kinda unkempt and they keep trashing the brooder.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

heh. I call them "trash children" because their feathers look kinda unkempt and they keep trashing the brooder.

My girls have been outside (in the run) for weeks, digging, zooming, and sunbathing. Rarely more than 5 minutes at each!

 

[Altairsky]

This is highly incorrect.
It is more likely that a chicken confuses grit for food if the grit is covered in feed dust from industrial preparations because they can taste the food dust on the grit surface. Chickens CAN taste. They know the difference between scratch and gravel just by tasting it. They also eat a lot of grit.
I thought my chickens had enough grit from free ranging, but they always made several trips on my sidewalk just to eat the leftovers of the construction site. They would eat cement, dig holes all around the corrugated tubing looking for gravel and sand, going as far as displacing some self-locking tiles and, most annoyingly, pooping all over the sidewalk and cement floor.
So I ordered a load of construction gravel, and got a whole pile unloaded in the farthest corner of my property, and my chickens would spend hours digging and eating from that pile of gravel. A trip to the gravel pile is the first thing they do every morning.
And more importantly, my chickens are not destroying my cement floor anymore.
I throw scratch and leftovers on that pile of gravel and never had a problem in years. And it's not even grit for birds, it's construction aggregate. uuuh... what a horrible chicken owner I am!
Chickens are not dumb. Let's just quit this whole grit terrorism unless someone has *actual proof*, including necropsy photos, of a chicken killing itself with feed grit.
Nobody posted any real proof of a dead chicken stuffed with gravel on this post.
The only way a chicken could die of overeating gravel is if this chicken had a disorder called "pica". All animals can be affected by pica. I know of cows with pica (they eat stones), cats (they eat mostly fabric), and dogs, and people of course. I've read on this forum of a chicken with pica disorder who would eat anything except food. That's the only case where a chicken can die from overeating stones. Pica is a deadly disease for all the animals - and persons- it affects.
This will be my last reply to this thread 'cause I really have nothing else to add. I just want to say, do your own research before getting scared of things that shouldn't be scary. It's often a false alarm.

 

[K0k0shka]

This is highly incorrect.
It is more likely that a chicken confuses grit for food if the grit is covered in feed dust from industrial preparations because they can taste the food dust on the grit surface. Chickens CAN taste. They know the difference between scratch and gravel just by tasting it. They also eat a lot of grit.
I thought my chickens had enough grit from free ranging, but they always made several trips on my sidewalk just to eat the leftovers of the construction site. They would eat cement, dig holes all around the corrugated tubing looking for gravel and sand, going as far as displacing some self-locking tiles and, most annoyingly, pooping all over the sidewalk and cement floor.
So I ordered a load of construction gravel, and got a whole pile unloaded in the farthest corner of my property, and my chickens would spend hours digging and eating from that pile of gravel. A trip to the gravel pile is the first thing they do every morning.
And more importantly, my chickens are not destroying my cement floor anymore.
I throw scratch and leftovers on that pile of gravel and never had a problem in years. And it's not even grit for birds, it's construction aggregate. uuuh... what a horrible chicken owner I am!
Chickens are not dumb. Let's just quit this whole grit terrorism unless someone has *actual proof*, including necropsy photos, of a chicken killing itself with feed grit.
Nobody posted any real proof of a dead chicken stuffed with gravel on this post.
The only way a chicken could die of overeating gravel is if this chicken had a disorder called "pica". All animals can be affected by pica. I know of cows with pica (they eat stones), cats (they eat mostly fabric), and dogs, and people of course. I've read on this forum of a chicken with pica disorder who would eat anything except food. That's the only case where a chicken can die from overeating stones. Pica is a deadly disease for all the animals - and persons- it affects.
This will be my last reply to this thread 'cause I really have nothing else to add. I just want to say, do your own research before getting scared of things that shouldn't be scary. It's often a false alarm.

It was on this very forum that people weighed in with actual stories of chickens getting crop impactions from too much grit. And there's a huge difference between a chicken walking up to a pile of gravel out in the open or by the roadside, expecting it to be a pile of gravel and treating it as such, vs. diving into its designated food dish where it expects to find nothing but food, so it gulps it down believing it to be food. The advice of don't mix grit with food is an enduring one that continues being given out by vets and experienced chicken owners, on this forum and beyond, which in itself should be enough to make you at least stop and consider it before tossing it with such certainty. A lot of other common myths have long been debunked, and people patrol this forum to remind others of this fact. But this one endures. There's gotta be a reason for that.

 

[InvertGang]

It was on this very forum that people weighed in with actual stories of chickens getting crop impactions from too much grit. And there's a huge difference between a chicken walking up to a pile of gravel out in the open or by the roadside, expecting it to be a pile of gravel and treating it as such, vs. diving into its designated food dish where it expects to find nothing but food, so it gulps it down believing it to be food. The advice of don't mix grit with food is an enduring one that continues being given out by vets and experienced chicken owners, on this forum and beyond, which in itself should be enough to make you at least stop and consider it before tossing it with such certainty. A lot of other common myths have long been debunked, and people patrol this forum to remind others of this fact. But this one endures. There's gotta be a reason for that.

Uh-oh. I tried giving grit to my 3 day old chicks in a separate container yesterday and they didn't stop eating it so I took it out after 20 minutes or so.

This morning I put a sprinkle (a couple pinches) of grit on top of their feeder after refilling it. I was changing from paper towel to wood shavings this morning and wanted them to have some grit in case they ate bits of wood. Do you think a sprinkle like that is enough to hurt them?

 

[K0k0shka]

Uh-oh. I tried giving grit to my 3 day old chicks in a separate container yesterday and they didn't stop eating it so I took it out after 20 minutes or so.

This morning I put a sprinkle (a couple pinches) of grit on top of their feeder after refilling it. I was changing from paper towel to wood shavings this morning and wanted them to have some grit in case they ate bits of wood. Do you think a sprinkle like that is enough to hurt them?

3 day old is too young for anything that's not food - they don't know what food is yet and will eat anything, in any amount. It's usually advised to put paper towels or something else on top of the bedding for the first week, until they have reliably learned what food is, to avoid them eating too much of anything else (whether bedding, grit, or other). Once you uncover the bedding, you can give them a little bit of grit (chick grit, the smaller size particles) - some people sprinkle it on top of the food, or in another container, but not a full container of it where they can overeat. They don't need much anyway. If they were with a hen, she would start teaching them from day 1 - what is food and what isn't, how to eat, etc. But without a mom, they are more likely to make mistakes, so they need more help from us in preventing the mistakes.

 

[InvertGang]

3 day old is too young for anything that's not food - they don't know what food is yet and will eat anything, in any amount. It's usually advised to put paper towels or something else on top of the bedding for the first week, until they have reliably learned what food is, to avoid them eating too much of anything else (whether bedding, grit, or other). Once you uncover the bedding, you can give them a little bit of grit (chick grit, the smaller size particles) - some people sprinkle it on top of the food, or in another container, but not a full container of it where they can overeat. They don't need much anyway. If they were with a hen, she would start teaching them from day 1 - what is food and what isn't, how to eat, etc. But without a mom, they are more likely to make mistakes, so they need more help from us in preventing the mistakes.

Yeah I took the grit out and gave them some wet crumble instead and they went bonkers, haha.

I put a handful of shavings in the corner yesterday and they pecked at it a bit but they didn't seem to be eating it, which is why I switched to shavings today. The instructions from the hatchery said to use shavings from day 1 but we wanted to see how they responded before we used them.