'Scraps' basically means 'not something we humans would eat'..........for various reasons. Slimy lettuce a slimy blackened mushroom a withered potato browned streaky celery an apple that i can stick my finger through moldy whole wheat bread three week old bean soup a recently discovered black peach with green stuff on it a chunk of eggplant that fell on the floor, got stepped on, then got licked by the dog more slimy lettuce slimy cukes slimy spinach the hard bottom part of cabbage and cauliflower broccoli 'stumps' I think you get it.......... I just can't see or feel secure about giving garbage to a chicken and i am NOT about to execute culinary surgery on the compost bucket to clean off all the crud from the scraps!! Yet i hear of people routinely tossing kitchen garbage to chickens, even letting them graze on compost. I don't wanna poison these boids. am i missing something??
I don't EVER give my chickens something I would not eat. You are not missing anything. You are being safe.
I do give my chickens 'leftovers' but nothing spoiled or molded just as a treat ...... It does not replace their regular feed intake just stuff that may be a lil shriveled or coloring a lil off but not spoiled .... things my 'fussy' human family chooses not to eat... sometimes I will cook a little extra to ensure leftovers for the chickens ... extra vegetables, pasta, hamburger, etc.
If you are keeping them locked up all of the time I guess you can decide what they eat and what they don't eat. If they are free range I promise you that they will find things that are even more disgusting than you just mentioned. A few weeks ago my free range birds were kicking up a fuss about something that they had found to eat outside in the backyard. I went to look at what they were so excited about... turns out the dog had thrown up. I regularly throw them all kinds of vegetable scraps and they love it!!!
i give mine kitchen scraps such as the tops of carrots, peelings, the scooped out seedy bits from squash, etc. it's FRESH kitchen waste. nothing moldy, ever. anything questionable goes in the compost, so it's still not wasted.
There was a thread recently here about losing some chickens to some "slimy" peas. I usually assume when people talk about giving the chickens kitchen scraps, they mean things that are fresh but not normally eaten -- melon rinds, apple cores, carrot trimmings, that sort of thing. Mine demolish all these things, they leave only a thin strip of green from a watermelon, nothing from apple trimmings. Maybe it's just how different people use the term "kitchen scraps." There are fresh scraps and yukky scraps!
I don't have my chickens yet, but now feel like if I throw some things out, I'm wasting a chicken treat. Tomato cores, peels from cucs cut into bite size pieces, dill and parsley stems also cut into pieces, the not rotten soft spots on peaches that have always turned me off but aren't bad and bananas that have gotten too ripe for my taste are getting added to a box in the freezer, and will make nice treats, I think...
Like others on the list, my chickens get things that would otherwise go in the trash and any left over dinner or lunch items that won't be eaten after a fashion. I don't give them anything moldy, just not a good idea in my honest thinking as would I eat it? Nope, so why make them? And I too will cook up a bit extra, knowing that my hard working hen and roo will be getting something extra.
We give them any kind of fresh scraps, nothing moldy or slimy (other than naturally slimy things like canteloupe seeds, which they love). A wilted salad is good.
The operative word is "scraps" not "waste." Kitchen scraps. As treats, not mainstay food in place of commercial feed. I have a little roving glutton some folks might call a miniature dachshund who just simply cannot understand why the chickens get stuff from the kitchen. He steals melon rinds, corn cobs, carrot bits, and gawd forbid I should ever leave sardines or tuna out for the birds! He picks up the whole can and runs away with it. <*sigh*> The best treat I give the chickens is BOSS (black oil sunflower seeds) and the second best is dry, rolled oatmeal - the old fashioned gotta cook it kind. They eat both treats out of my hands. (The dog doesn't get any of those two treats.)
