My week old chicks are wild about grass and wild plants snipped up small onto a plate with some powdered slippery elm tree bark and a little barley meal. It's like they knew something about the green plants without anyone telling them. Before yesterday they were eating only their starter. My Natural Rearing book from Juliette de Bairacli Levy gives me a long list of beneficial plants: dandelion, fennel, dill, mint, anise, most seeds of edible plants, garlic and onion against illness and parasites. I never went into any of this as my hens raise their own young but as this has its hazards and my only hen at present is a bad sitter, I've started saving eggs to hatch out in a safer environment.
I don't give my chickens anything cooked but they're running around free in a large uncultivated garden. I started hatching out some of the eggs myself in the hope there'd be fewer raids from the sky and a larger flock. I'm giving my chicks an organic starter mixture and raw snipped greens from outside.Here's a link to my youtube video of my chicks being fed with their starter feed and some corn on the cob being mashed for them by their mum.
It just seemed natural that if she got a treat she would give them a taste too!
(We only bought one corn as it wasn't cheap - cut it into 3 and spread it out over a few days! When they are older and our crop is ready they'll get some real home grown organic corn.)
I was so worried they wouldn't learn how to eat, because when I showed them the dish of starter feed they just stood on top of it and looked aorund!
But when I put a pinch of starter feed infront of the hen she immediately encouraged the chicks to tuck in, she seemed to pick it up and toss it to the side for them to find.
WHAT A REFIEF!
I can't imagine giving mine cooked egg - it just seems so wrong - like cannibalism.
I'm vegetarian and have never bought any live worms or crickets to feed my chickens.
I would never give them meat scraps from the kitchen or cat food - but that's just my perogative.
The older ones get plenty of seeds and freshly grown lettuce & veg.
But if they can catch and eat any crickets or little wriggly things that take their fancy then that's their perogative!
I think you've got a point here! Mentally deranged chickens getting bored in a cooped up space without access to fresh plants and insects, will sometimes eat eggs. So you don't want to go teaching them to like the taste. One idea to prevent them recognizing eggs as something to eat rather than to hatch, is never to put a shell on the compost pile without crushing it well first. I grind the shells up slightly and use them in the garden instead of lime. Ground egg shells (not too fine) is also excellent for dogs.Isn't it kind of a not good idea to give them eggs? I mean, I REALLY don't want them to start getting a
taste for eggs, since they are going to be layers (Buff. Orps.)I think yogurt sounds like a great idea!!!
AND, mine usually LOOOOOVE moths!!!! If I put on in their box, they go INSANE!!!!!!! One will catch it,
and then rund around and around peeping as louda as it can, and everyone is chasing it!!!!They are
soooo cute!!! But, anyway, Just wondering about the whole egg thing cause I just don't want them
eating eggs. :\\
If I have a cracked egg out in the nests, I toss it on the ground for them. If I have an over-abundance of eggs, I hard boil a dozen or so, put them in doubled plastic grocery bags, and smack them around until I don’t feel any whole ones. Then back out to the coop they go, shells and all, eagerly devoured by the crew. I toss eggshells along with other kitchen waste in a pail hanging in the kitchen. It all goes out there. 
In the first place I never give anything cooked to my chickens. Of course they wouldn't know a scrambled egg had once been a raw egg. If I feed a raw chicken thigh and leg to my dog, they'll dive in and try to snitch some. And any other kind of meat. I've never had an egg eater either. My chickens of the moment march into my kitchen if I leave the door open and stand next to a pot of sunflower or pumpkin seeds until I give them some. But that's because I felt like being nice to them one cold rainy day. And pumpkin seeds are excellent for laying hens. I don't think feeding chickens table scraps, bread and other cooked or baked food has real value. Of course they love treats but they're supposed to be catching their own bugs and digging for their own worms. And eating lots and lots of fresh grass and plants! My week old chicks are losing interest in their starter pellets but jump around wildly if I snip some wild plants into their cage.If you can tell me how a chicken realizes that cooked up scrambled eggs came from the eggs they see and lay, you are way smarter than I am.
An egg eater usually discovers quite by accident as she pecks at an egg and it breaks, that it’s edible. Once started, egg eating is tough, if not impossible, to break. But what an egg eater looks for is an oval, hard shelled egg to break into. So the concern over feeding eggs is well-founded, but it would take a huge leap for cooked eggs to resemble raw ones to a chicken. I have never had an egg eater in all the years I had chickens. I also feed them leftover chicken or the offal from processing a few, and they don’t turn into cannibals, either. So if you want to feed cooked eggs to your flock, I’d sure go right ahead and do it. If you aren’t comfortable feeding eggs, then there are plenty of alternative treats, which is just fine too. No rules, just what works best for each keeper!
Do you cut the grapes in tiny pieces or just in half?
