Hen ate a candy bar! Need help!

[Dom95]

My 3 year old buff orphington hen jumped up when I was sitting down and pecked off a decent sized piece of my 3 musketeers chocolate bar off and ate it. The part looked like it was mainly the inside of the bar and not the outer chocolate shell.

My local vet is closed until Monday and I am unsure how much danger she is in. I’m fully panicking and unsure how to help her or what to do. I’ve never experienced this before with any of my flock.

I’ll be attaching the ingredients of the candy bar to this as well. For reference my hen also weight approx. 5 pounds

 

[SmiYa0126]

The inside is more of a nougat then chocolate I don't think a beak full would hurt her, did she have a full crop at night?

 

[NatJ]

My 3 year old buff orphington hen jumped up when I was sitting down and pecked off a decent sized piece of my 3 musketeers chocolate bar off and ate it. The part looked like it was mainly the inside of the bar and not the outer chocolate shell.

My local vet is closed until Monday and I am unsure how much danger she is in. I’m fully panicking and unsure how to help her or what to do. I’ve never experienced this before with any of my flock.

I’ll be attaching the ingredients of the candy bar to this as well. For reference my hen also weight approx. 5 pounds

She should be fine. Just one bite (even a very big bite) should not be enough to cause issues.

For anything that a human can safely eat, a chicken can typically eat several big bites with no ill effects, even if it is on a list of things not to feed to chickens. Most of the "do not feed" things are only dangerous if the chicken eats large amounts or eats them every day (and some are things that chickens would not normally eat anyway, if they were given a choice.)

 

[DonyaQuick]

I don’t think milk chocolate like is in most candy bars is as toxic as it often gets treated. Not saying anyone should go giving their birds candy bars deliberately, but my parents had a weird thing about always giving a small piece of absolutely anything they ate to their parrots - often in proportions that were way bigger relative to the bird’s size than what I would consider a bite, and that included many samples of milk chocolate and other stuff with chocolate in it around holidays. As soon as my bird of the bunch was exclusively under my care and I had moved out, I stopped that nonsense and put him on a healthier diet, but my point is I’ve seen quite a few birds of different species eat bits of candy bars with chocolate, tastes of chocolate ice cream, etc and they were fine. Given how much of that I saw, it was bizarre to me when I first heard someone say that stuff should be toxic to birds, not just bad for them as a regular thing because of the sugar. I’ve read in a few places that the stuff that’s a bigger worry is the ultra dark, very bitter stuff used more in baking. Maybe there are some dark chocolate bars like that - I’m not sure. But I think your hen will be fine.

 

[RoyalChick]

One big beak full. Even two. Would not be enough to do her any harm.

There are scientific studies on parrots that generally say it takes 100g of chocolate to kill a parrot. That is a lot of chocolate!
One study found fatal dose at 20g of chocolate. But that is still much more than a couple of beakfuls!

As others have said, milk chocolate is much less toxic than dark.

Your chicken will be fine.