How to use the whole animal (waste not want not)

[bamadude]

Caught some fish today. Thinking of making a head and gut stew for my chickens. Can chickens eat fish bones?

 

[hennible]

If you cook them long enough, so there soft I bet you can... Good idea dude

 

[Amberjem]

Nawww... I'm a wimp I usually put a ice cube in my hot tea.. I have a tender mouth

 

[vehve]

Bama, how about putting it through a food processor? I bet that would grind up the bones nicely, and they're soft enough to not damage the processor blades. You'd get a nice calcium boost too.

 

[Beer can]

Caught some fish today. Thinking of making a head and gut stew for my chickens. Can chickens eat fish bones?

Bama, how about putting it through a food processor? I bet that would grind up the bones nicely, and they're soft enough to not damage the processor blades. You'd get a nice calcium boost too.

I have a hand crank meat grinder from WalMart, sucked with venison so I bought a bigger electric stainless steel one from Sears.
I use the hand crank one outside and grind whole bluegills through it, have to chop the big ones in half length wise so they fit. Easy to clean, just hose it out, not like I have to wash it when it's just for the chickens now. Head, bones, guts, scales everything but the hook. I feed it to them raw. They didn't gobble it right up but I would put a pound or two on top of their feed and before the day was over it would be gone.

 

[Beer can]

I thought about using carp and suckers from a reservoir near us, I don't eat them and bluegill fillets are good. But carp and suckers live a long time, bigger risk of mercury contamination. Small Bluegills have a shorter life span in the food chain so less of a risk if I feed the chickens a lot of them, and their easier to catch. The kids can catch a couple dozen in a hour and I have a huge pond full of them about a half mile from us.

 

[vehve]

Feeding the fish raw probably keeps the nutrients better, although cooking would lessen the risk of getting some sort of worms from the fish.

 

[hennible]

I was just thinking that. Worth looking up if the parasites fish carry are the same as land based parasites

 

[vehve]

I seem to remember that some parasites are shared. Broad tapeworm is transferable from fish to people at least. With roe it's recommended to freeze it for at least 24 hours to get rid of them, I suppose the same would work for fish.

 

[hennible]

Yes sea food can give humans parasites... Eating sushi is responsible for something like 47 cases of parasites a year... Or maybe that was just foodborne illness in general not specifically parasites... Either way it's probably safe to assume we can give our chickens worms by feeding them raw fish... That is if they don't already have worms