Hello All, I was trimming up a store bought turkey for the oven today and set aside an ounce or two of excess skin and tossed it out to the ladies along with some veggies. They loved it. I then thought better of it, as I didn't think of a risk of food borne illness being passed on to them until well after they had devoured the trimmings. Have any of you fed raw poultry to your flocks? At this point I'm more looking for confirmation that I didn't poison my girls, I'm paranoid.
My ducks always get all kinds of meat and veggie scraps uncooked, it can't be worse than what they pull out of the ground after a heavy rain-fall. One of my ducks catches mice and lizards and devours them whole, not to talk about the countless grass-hoppers, bugs, spiders, worms and other stuff that has been converted into duck & eggs. No idea if chickens or other poultry have more sensitive stomachs, but ducks…
I do the same with no issue. I wouldn’t throw out more than they can eat quickly, but otherwise you’re fine!
Cook it first!!! Store bought chicken, at least, is usually contaminated with nasty bacteria from the processing plant; Salmonella, Shigella, and more, 80% of the time. It's why wee cook it before eating it ourselves. It's not sensible to deliberately introduce such contaminants into our pets, or egg producers, ever. , Mary
Just because I do not want raw at my girls I will at least do it medium to done if they get it or us Welcome to Backyard Chickens also
I heard, on a BBC documentary, that an alarmingly high percentage of chicken & turkey meat was found to be contaminated with Salmonella and other bacteria. However the opinion was that this wasn't introduced by the 'processing plant' - it's just found within the birds in a high percentage of cases....a figure of around 80% was mentioned in the programme. The use of antibiotics introduced into the feed of the intensively farmed birds to minimise mortality rates has had the unwanted effect of making some of these bugs resistant to certain antibiotics.
I probably misremembered the actual source of contamination, but the high % of contamination is real, and there are repeated studies showing this. Also more than one study showing that households where the dogs are fed 'raw diets' have higher likely hood of such organisms present. Again, . Mary
Regardless you don't want to feed your chickens something with any risk of salmonella. If they get it then the salmonella will get in the eggs and you will eat a spoon full of cookie dough or something and trust me, you don't want salmonella poisoning.