Do I need to remove the pits? Most of my birds are bantams. Can they handle pits?
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Will they be able to pass the pit? I don't know what their digestive tract is like.No need to remove the pits, they don’t contain dangerous chemicals like cyanide in apple or pear seeds. Go ahead and give them as many cherries as you like
My birds rush to gobble the cherry pits when I spit them out. None of my poultry have ever exhibited any ill effects from eating cherry pits.I feed my birds pitted cherries. I'd be worried about the pits.
- Cherries, Apricots, Plums, Peaches: Cyanide
Don't freak out if you accidentally swallow a cherry pit—they're rarely poisonous when eaten whole—but whatever you do, don't eat a broken pit. Because aside from tasting really bitter and generally being impossible to chew, the stones of certain stone fruits, like cherries, apricots, plums and peaches, contain cyanogenic compounds—science talk for "stuff that your body can turn into cyanide." So, how many cherry pits is a lethal amount of cherry pits? After some quick Googling, we found that hydrogen cyanide is lethal at about 1.52 milligrams per kilogram, meaning that it takes little more than 0.1 grams (a dime weighs about one gram) of the toxin to dispatch a 150-pound human. A single cherry yields roughly 0.17 grams of lethal cyanide per gram of seed, so depending on the size of the kernel, ingesting just one or two freshly crushed pits can lead to death. (Credit: sk8geek / Flickr, MissMessie / Flickr, kudumomo / Flickr)