feeding hens broken eggs

[mellee]

today an egg was droppped so i just thrown it back to the chickens which they ate it up but now my husband upset thinking the hens will eat the eggs as they lay them please tell me that my chickens will not egg the eggs

 

[DobermanGuy]

Your husband sounds smart.

I would not personally have fed them the broken egg.

 

[Yayah]

I think that is a legitimate concern. I wouldn't do it again. I do feed crushed up egg shells back to my birds, but the people I've talked to that give their chickens eggs to eat have said to cook it first so they don't realize what it is & that they like the taste of eggs & start breaking them. I don't have much experience with this, but hopefully they just overlook this one incident and forget it happened. Good luck! Let me know how it works out.

 

[madamwlf]

There is nothing wrong with feeding hens broken eggs. I do it all the time and I'm pretty sure there are others on here that do it. I've not had an issue with egg eating as a smashed egg on the ground looks a lot different then a freshly laid egg. Chickens don't usually make the connection that what they are eating on the ground is the same as what they lay.

 

[mickey328]

Welcome, Mellee! I give our girls their shells, but I rinse the white out and dry them, then crush them pretty finely first. I also give them some eggs, but only after cooking. Generally, they get any that break or ooze out of the shell when I'm boiling them. I mush 'em up with a fork and refrigerate. I definitely don't want them to get the idea that breaking 'em open is a good source of food, LOL

 

[ChicKat]

today an egg was droppped so i just thrown it back to the chickens which they ate it up but now my husband upset thinking the hens will eat the eggs as they lay them please tell me that my chickens will not egg the eggs

My approach with broken eggs (which have actually only been broken by my own clumseyness) is to cook them and feed back OR to mix the soft egg with some dry feed so that it is distributed through a bit of feed. Having soft or non-shell eggs used to be the more common way that my bunch got to eat eggs, or from breakfast leftover scrambled.

I think that your husband has a good insight that chickens may be able to connect the dots---but probably on a one-time-thing....they wouldn't. So in future to solve his concern, if it were me, I would cook or mix with feed.

And WELCOME to the forum!

 

[milo1108]

I know if you leave your eggs in there for awhile and the chickens have nothing else to eat, then they will start eating their own eggs. Its only what I have heard but I wouldn't be too concerned about it if you are regularly collecting the eggs.

 

[Vicky2479]

I usually get the odd broken egg due to my 2 yr daughter helping to collect them, sometimes it happens near the coop and i am to slow as the girls swoop on them quick as you like but if I can I will feed it to them on the one side of the yard. So far I have never had any of them try to eat them from the nest.

 

[Headgear]

I've had chickens for better than thirty years and never had a problem with the girls eating eggs. I think it is a wives tail that you can teach them to become egg eaters by allowing them to eat eggs occasionally. I usually have 75 to 100 girls and give all the eggs back to them to eat when they are medicated for the entire withdraw time which can be a couple of weeks. Never had a problem. I just take them out of the coop, out in the chicken yard and pitch them all out of the bucket into the air and its a free for all. They love them but never start going into the nest boxes and pecking them open and eating them. I don't think they can make the connection.

The only time I do have any problem with them eating an egg in the nest boxes is when someone is laying a soft egg and it gets broken by one of them when they come in to lay. I think it is more important to make sure that there are enough nests so that you don't get more than six or eight eggs in each. They break them easier when there are too many for them to step around on. Also, make sure they are getting enough calcium to produce good solid shells. They don't make the connection that there is food inside the eggs but as soon as one gets broken and they see it, its gone in a flash.

I've heard of people having egg eaters and having to sit and watch to finally catch the culprit and cull it before it teaches all the others to eat them also. Not happening! after thirty years with a lot of hens, I would have had the problem by now. When I was a young'un, I rented a farm house from a little old German lady who lived in another house on the same farm. She worked the place by herself for forty years after her parents passed on. The love of her life was her chickens. She was in her eighties and all crippled up with artherytis and missed her girls badly. I cleaned up her coop and got a mess of chickens and she would sit by the window for hours and just smile. That was nearly forty years ago and that experience did something to me and I've had chickens ever since. She was the first one who told me about egg eaters and I heard it several times since but I don't think so. I love her to death, rest her soul but I think her imagination was getting the best of her.

 

[Fred's Hens]

Their instinct makes them gobble up any broken egg in the nest. A spoiled, broken egg in a clutch would be nasty and a potentially brooding hen doesn't want to sit on that mess. Any egg that gets dropped in the coop gets pounced upon. A brooding hen often cleans up some of the eggs when the chicks hatch. Again, it is their instinct, developed over thousands of years of survival of the species.

There is no need to wash, clean or bake the egg shells you feed back. You may, but it isn't necessary in any way. A chicken lives in a world of bacteria, worms, manure, grubs and insects. They are hardy birds.

I've never had an egg eater in all these years. But, if I did? That bird would be soup before lunch time. Any animal that would cut off it's future by such self destructive tendencies is not fit to have it's DNA live on. It has some really bad programing in its instinct.