Do you think it is wrong to feed chickens chicken scraps?

[ChickensRDinos]

YES it is definitely wrong to feed chickens chicken! they werent created to be cannibals!

Cannibalism is fairly common among domesticated chickens and other poultry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_poultry

 

[attila the mum]

my girls love it and i hate wasting food..hence why i got chooks

 

[jak2002003]

They (the chickens) could not care less if they are eating a dead relative!

Sometimes if they find a dead chick they will gladly eat it up.

So they are not sentimental about such things.

 

[phicri72]

i figure if it is cooked, sometimes cooked twice if you are making stock from a roasted chicken carcass, there's really not a problem.

 

[mickey328]

Protein is protein and we try to get as much to the birds as we can. I wouldn't feed it raw, just because they could possibly relate that to their sisters and start eating each other, LOL. I do the same with eggs...all the ones with cracked or damaged shells get fed back to them, but I do cook them first. I know lots of folks don't cook them; it's a personal choice.

 

[Rosie BB]

I make soup out of NY chicken and turkey scraps. Then I give some of the soup to my hen.

 

[Aust1227]

I started collecting hog slop from a local nursing home (kitchen and buffet scraps, NOT plate scrapings). The majority of the food goes to the hogs. But I throw shovelfuls of oatmeal, rice, grits, turkey sandwhiches, ext.. They love it all. It has cut WAY down on the grain bill.

 

[Kildare49]

Just finished butchering 2 deer. One of the rib cages was placed next to coop. Very happy chickens! At the rate they are working on it, it will be picked clean by end of week,

 

[enola]

After making stock and having saved all the meat I can for human food, I throw all the solids from the stock pot (bones, meat, cartilage, skin, veggies, whatever) into the chicken run. I do the same whether it's beef stock, chicken stock, duck stock, turkey stock or baboon stock. The chickens eat every last soft scrap and the bones disappear into the litter. You can't even see or smell a thing afterwards btw either, it's like the stuff was never there. For a while I felt weird about giving chicken to the chickens, and so I would feed them scraps from other animals only, and compost the chicken scraps--but that always seemed like a waste of good animal protein, which is something I can never seem to have too much of on my homestead-based feeding methods. But eventually I realized that chickens are naturally opportunistic cannibals and carrion scavengers anyway and therefore the occasional addition of a few small scraps of chicken meat seems unlikely be harmful.

Would I feed my chickens a diet based on protein from chicken meat? Would I raise a flock of chickens for meat to feed other chickens? Would I go out and buy packages of chicken to feed my chickens? No, because that would be unnatural, weird, ecologically unsound, unhealthy, inefficient in terms of production, and generally just kind of dumb in a common sense way. But recycling the occasional household scraps to avoid waste, and use a free resource to provide a little much-need protein supplementation from time to time is the exact opposite.

 

You eat baboons?

 

[3ChickensNADuck]

Sometimes I feel bad about giving the birds chicken left overs but when I think about it, they always have access to their layers feed and can free range to find bugs, but they usually choose to eat the left over chicken. So I'm not forcing them, it's by the chickens choice to eat chicken.