New to chickens! Can chickens be vegan?

poshpolish

Hatching
Nov 19, 2017
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Hi everyone! This is probably a bit of a dumb question, but hear me out, I guess?

I'd really like to get chickens some day. Probably ex-battery hens and/or some free roosters from local classifieds as I see a lot of those. Not right now because I live in an apartment, but sometime in distant the future. I don't have an awful lot of experience with chickens aside from when I was young and my family and I lived in the country and raised pigs and cornish x for meat, but I think I know the basics aside from diet pretty much which leads to the burning question in my mind.. can chickens be vegan?

I don't expect to have "truly" vegan chickens as they're animals and ideally, they'd be free ranging and eating lots of goodies outside and I'm alright with that, but I mean if I fed something homemade like Garden Betty's whole grain chicken feed (minus oyster shell, feed shells and eggs back to hens instead) or similar in addition to table scraps, garden veggies and bugs and such they snap up while outside, would that be sufficient or do you actually have to add animal protein to their food as well? I'd be fine with doing that, too, if I had to, but if it's possible not to, that'd be my preference.

Sorry if I sound like an idiot. :oops:
 
Hi and welcome to BYC - thanks for joining us.

Feel free to ask any questions you like - we don't judge, and nobody would think that you "sound like an idiot".

You can readily check the ingredients of feed, and see if it contains animal protein or not. I'm pretty sure that keeping chickens in the manner you describe would be fine - people were feeding chickens in a similar manner for decades (if not centuries).
 
That diet sounds fine to me. It won't really be that vegan because, as you said, the chickens will find and eat bugs. Chickens require complete protein, just like we do, and while a lot of plant sources are incomplete individually, if you feed them a variety of plant proteins there can be a complete set of all of the amino acids they need. I'm new to BYC but I did study animal science at university. Like with any feed mix the things to look out for are the macronutrients (fat, protein and carbohydrates) which look fine and the micronutrients (like calcium, selenium and iron etc) which are usually added in the form of a pre-mix to all commercial feed. If a deficiency turns up later you can always address it by making some adjustments.
 
The only way to have truly vegan chickens is to lock them up in a very unnatural environment and feed them a controlled diet. Chickens are naturally omnivores. They will eagerly run after and even fight to get bugs, worms, etc.

You can feed them a type of pellet that only has vegetable/mineral ingredients, but if you allow them to live with access to the outside world, they will find and eat small creatures. That is simply their nature.

If you are okay with them eating insects when free ranging, then the rest of their diet can be vegan. Be sure to check their feed to insure that it has sufficient levels of complete protein and calcium in particular.
 
:welcome

Always feel free to ask questions, someone here at BYC will be able to answer them.

Thanks for joining us!
 
Just like you, chickens need a balanced diet with various nutrients. If you are vegan you probably understand this pretty well. Certain nutrients that chickens need are amino acids that come from animal products. I know you are not talking about organic, but the certified organic rules allow synthetic versions of these amino acids to be added to the feed. Certified organic rules allow certain animal products to be added to the feed but ban others, like animal slaughter by-products are banned.

For any of the nutrients they need it’s not what is in one bite, it’s how many grams they eat in the entire day, and even that is averaged out over a few days. Part of the answer depends on the quality of their forage, what are they finding to eat. That’s not limited to bugs either. If they can find them and catch them they love mice, small snakes, frogs, crawfish, and all kinds of other creepy crawlies. How big a part of their diet are that scratch feed and garden of kitchen scraps?

Another part is are you after them surviving or being highly productive? Chickens can survive and be relatively healthy on a somewhat unbalanced diet. There are limits of course on how unbalanced it can be and them staying healthy. The more balanced the diet is the larger they will grow, the more eggs they will lay, and the larger those eggs will be. If you hatch eggs it can have an effect on hatchability.

For thousands of years chickens have thrived while foraging themselves for all of what they eat, though in certain climates they need help in winter. But they had high quality forage. They will not grow as big, lay as many eggs, and what eggs they lay will not be as big as if you micromanage their diet to see that they get the exact balance they need, but they did quite well. Most of us don’t have that quality of forage however.

I don’t know why you want to limit part of what they eat to vegan, that’s your business. But the more you limit certain nutrients in part of what they eat, the harder you make it for them to achieve a balanced diet through the rest of what they eat.
 
:welcome As you know, everyone has already given great answers.
Just remember, on BYC there are no 'stupid questions', we'll be happy to answer!
 
Welcome! Those 'old time' chickens also weren't the same genetically as most modern breeds, either in size or egg laying capacity. A hen who's designed to lay sixty or eighty eggs per year isn't the same as a bird who will lay 250 0r 300!!! Limiting nutrition produces a malnourished animal who will deplete her own body to attempt that level of egg production! That's sad and ugly, and maybe an extreme example, but it does happen. Small breeds with very low egg production that live in a very rich environment that's warm all year might do better.
Wild jungle fowl is SE Asia are totally 'natural', and far from vegan! Chickens are like little velociraptors in so many ways, we should be glad they aren't six feet tall. Mary
 
Actually Mary, a lot of them were the same genetically. Dominique, Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and others have been around a long time. A lot of those were kept on small farms and depended almost entirely on forage for food. I grew up on one of those farms. I remember Dad bringing home some Dominique chicks one time and New Hampshire another. When they were old enough he turned them loose with the rest of his flock. We supplemented their feed in winter but in the good weather months they fed themselves.

I don't know what hatchery they came from, he got them from a feed store. But many of the hatcheries we use today were in existence then. Some of their flocks are from the same birds they had then. They've had those flocks that long. The genetics are pretty much the same.

If you feed chickens a high protein diet they will grow bigger bodies than chickens raised on a lower protein diet so they need more protein to maintain those big bodies. On a low protein diet they don't lay as many eggs and they are not as big. Our domesticated chickens are genetically different from the red jungle fowl they are thought to derive from (some geneticists now say our domestic chickens may have been derived from up to four different original types of birds, not just the red jungle fowl). That difference in genetics is partly through selective breeding and partly through mutations humans have nourished. But these things have not happened in the past f3w decades, many of these breeds were developed a long time ago.

My guess from reading the OP's question is that they are not interested in raising chickens for meat or for eggs, but are looking more as a rescue operation where they can live out their lives as chickens. Why they want to partially feed them vegan I don't know. The feed may be more expensive (not sure) and if it is a scratch feed, certainly will not be a complete ration even if you don't consider animal content. I think they'd gave to have really good forage for it to work.

I will concede one point, at least partially. The OP is talking about battery hens. Those have been bred to lay more and larger eggs. One reason commercial operations feed a lower protein diet than many on here insist is absolutely necessary us that their food to egg conversion rate is so good and their small bodies need less nutrients (especially protein) for maintenance that if they fed then a high protein diet they would induce medical problems. Just like the broilers are bred to grow so fast they can have medical problems, the commercial hybrids are somewhat delicate and require more of a specialized diet to not have prolapse, internal laying, or egg binding problems. I'm not sure if depending mostly on forage would be better or worse for them. I'm not sure how important those animal products are to their overall well-being, but I'd think pretty important.
 
Probably ex-battery hens and/or some free roosters from local classifieds

Great idea, they deserve a good home!
Keep in mind those ex battery hens will have their 1st real winter outside a climated warehouse. And will probably have a lot of bald areas on their bodies. They will grow most of them back in fall during their molt but that is a process that requires a lot of energy from them.
An extra protein boost from hardboiled/scrambled eggs, mealworms and cooked ground meat is what I wouldn't want them to miss out on tbh.

Good luck and a lot of fun with your future flock. :)
 

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