Feeding hens their own shells...

It's easy to forget they are in the oven and incinerate them.
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Thanks. Yes, I forgot a bunch in the oven this morning. Lets just say burned shells are very stinky! (My girls are too young to need calcium yet, I was just experimenting and planning to feed baked shells to my dogs.)
 
I have always given mine whole eggs to eat all these years and never had an chronic egg eater. Any eggs too poopy go to the dogs or chickens, whomever gets to it first.

Hah! I know 2 other people who do that. One said she just throws it on the ground hard enough that it will break and the chickens gobble it up. She has never, in 20+ years, had a problem with an egg eater.

Old wives tales die hard...or not at all
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I personally do not feed my egg shells back to my chickens...but that is my decision. I asked my MIL and she has raised chickens since she was little girlsaid that in the good ole days they did that and it never hurt the chickens.
 
I have to say, growing up we bred horses and I don't recall ever having one of the mares eat her placenta but maybe we removed it to soon. Maybe our mares just didn't want them...who knows.

As far as giving chickens their shells I would be more worried about teaching them to eat their own eggs but I guess (hopefully) they're not smart enough to associate the shell with the egg - which is why you don't give them whole eggs to eat.

Our horses always do. Maybe it has something to do with where they give birth. We never ever have mares in a barn, they give birth out on the pasture and dont have any help. I was thinking that maybe if they are in a stall they dont feel the need to eat it.
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I would think with my high school biology I took some 20 years ago the placenta should not be poisonous to the horse or cow it came out of it protects the offspring from the mothers diseases and delivers food to the baby and waste to the mother for her body to expel with her waste. so in a way it's like a blood donation from you to you for an operation when it comes to germs, if you have xyz you coming in contact with you isn't going to make you sick since you already have the exact same strain of xyz. in fact it probably makes the animal better because it may IDK act as a vaccine to an illness the mother may have fought off due to having extra hormones due to pregnancy not due to growing anti-bodies and this may give her antibodies like a flu shot.
 
Ok so the economic motivations for feeding chickens their own eggshells are obvious, and the girls certainly seem to enjoy them...

My question is whether anyone has ever read or heard of research done on the long-term safety of chickens eating their own eggshells. For example, the lethal mad cow disease may have not ever existed, and certainly wouldn't have ever spread had people not been feeding cow parts to their cows. So what about our lovely chickens eating their eggs? Any thoughts?
PS... Mad cow was actually from infected sheep originally. Parts of infected sheep were mixed into the cattle feed. Later it was also infected cow fed back to the cows. But cows don't eat other dead cows, sheep don't eat other dead sheep. Chickens eating shells is actually a natural occurance in nature without the help of humans, but you probably got that from my earlier comment plus a number of others. :D
 

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