My rooster ate a few raw beans half hour ago! Will it kill him?? I'm panicking!

[Shadrach]

Hey...you could have said that a bit nicer. The oxalate thing is real. If you haven’t had problems that’s great. But maybe someone on this board has. It doesn’t mean the information is wrong. And it doesn’t mean when asked for my references, because they come from the web they should be taken with a grain of salt. I feel like I should stop offering anything I’ve learned because lots of people make a point of trying to refute it.

It wasn't meant to be horrid. It was just an observation on the human condition.
Have you had any chicken health problems directly related to their diet?

 

[Kathy Golla]

It wasn't meant to be horrid. It was just an observation on the human condition.

Thank you..
I knew about not feeding chard or spinach.
I was having low egg production and soft shelled problems. I feed my hens a bit of greens every day to get them back into the pen after free ranging. Greens are recommended by the vet if I’m going to give any treats as they are high vitamin, no calorie.
I remembered about the oxalic acid thing and looked up the levels of what I was feeding. I was feeding collards and grated raw carrots at the time. Documentation said both were high in oxalic acid.
So I stopped feeding those and my egg problems resolved. coincidental? Maybe.

 

[Shadrach]

Thank you..
I knew about not feeding chard or spinach.
I was having low egg production and soft shelled problems. I feed my hens a bit of greens every day to get them back into the pen after free ranging. Greens are recommended by the vet if I’m going to give any treats as they are high vitamin, no calorie.
I remembered about the oxalic acid thing and looked up the levels of what I was feeding. I was feeding collards and grated raw carrots at the time. Documentation said both were high in oxalic acid.
So I stopped feeding those and my egg problems resolved. coincidental? Maybe.

Maybe I've been lucky but the only feed related health problem I've had here was from commercial feed. (Back to the information one gets from the Internet)
When I started looking after the chickens here they were getting layers pellets that contained 4.something calcium. The flock was and is a mixed flock in both sex and age.
I had a couple of roosters die from seemingly unexplained causes that I initially put down to heart problems. A while ago my vet and I cut open yet another dead rooster and found that his liver had packed up. This is a symptom of too much calcium. Further research and some help from a member here with some links he provided suggested that calcium overdose for roosters and chicks is a known problem.
There again it's partly my own stupidity because the bags of feed state it is for laying hens and even I know rooster don't lay eggs.

 

[Kathy Golla]

I have read about that on the board...it seems to catch up with the roosters after a few years (?)
I also don’t think that would be very obvious until you find someone having the same problem. What are you supposed to feed the hens (it’s a rhetorical question, I know the answer, now)?
It would be nice if the layer feed bag said something on it about it.

 

[Morrigan]

I think the other part of the equation is different flocks of chickens may be differently adapted to their environments. If you have several generations of chickens living under walnut trees, it stands to reason that only the chickens that handle the walnuts well, will live on to breed, and eventually you get a group of chickens who can thrive eating walnuts.

Not all humans do well on the exact same diet, and I can't think it is that much different for chickens.