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

[Miss Lydia]

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.

Baboon stock?

 

[aart]

When I first started chicken sitting I asked what to do with a cracked egg we found in a nest and he threw it on the floor of the coop, it was GONE in 3 seconds flat! He's never had any egg eaters. Whenever they BBQ chicken all the bones go out in the yard for the chooks to chow. Was funny the first time I went over and there were clean cooked chicken bones all over the yard.

 

[triplepurpose]

Baboon stock?

Hahaha!! I'm glad someone caught that...

 

[Gargoyle]

Human cannibals that eat people on a regular basis begin presenting signs of neurological problems such as ticks and loss of coordination.

I hope that wasn't confirmed through a properly controlled peer-reviewed scientific study with test groups.

 

[triplepurpose]

I hope that wasn't confirmed through a properly controlled peer-reviewed scientific study with test groups.

Yes, let us hope it was through an observational study rather than a controlled study...

 

[Miss Lydia]

I hope that wasn't confirmed through a properly controlled peer-reviewed scientific study with test groups.

probably was but we'll never know.

 

[Nutcase]

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

 

[Gargoyle]

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

 

[Nutcase]

haha no i actually like that

 

[Gargoyle]

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

Saw a beautiful program last night on public television about snow owls on the Alaskan tundra. They filmed an owl couple, the female had 5 chicks. Food was very scarce, and eventually the smallest, youngest one died. The mother really tried to protect, feed and nurture that one but it was too week, she stuck by it to the end. When it was dead she cut it up and fed it to the other four to keep them from starving. That was enough to tide them over until the father was able to find a new source of food.

Of course, one difference is that chickens are omnivores, those owls are carnivores.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2257892318/