water quality question

[AndreaS]

Are chickens very sensitive to water quality? We just had a new well dug before I got my chicks. My water has not been tested yet....should I be giving them filtered water instead of straight well water? Just curious...
What do you guys do for their drinking water?
Thanks!
Andrea

 

[Gallusfarm]

You know, that is a good question... Mostly because they are young, I can understand your concern. Whenver I ask old timers about things like this they'll say - "back in the day before we had wells - (or testing labs) we gave them water out of the creek"... You'll be OK. Are you concerned about bacteria or heavy metals, or something else? Most of the time chickens poo in their water anyway and they even eat poo, so I don't think their stomachs are too sensitive to it... But if you want to give them bottled water to keep your mind at ease, that is perfectly fine. Unless you have a creek nearby

ETA, oh, I forgot - back in the day they didn't have to worry about pollution... Forget what I said about using the creek if you live near a major city. Isn't that sad?

 

[Akane]

There was a thread awhile back that someone found out heavy metals in their water were harming their chickens (and themselves). For the most part though chickens are pretty hardy to all types of water. Your water would have to be extreme to cause problems and even then it would take time. They aren't likely to get poisoned and die tomorrow or even next week so you have time to get it tested and see if you need to do anything. We just put a filter on our house because there's no way I'd drink our well water straight and I wasn't giving it to all the animals. It wasn't feasible to give the dogs and chickens bottled water considering how much they drank but my hamsters, sugar gliders, and rabbits were getting bottled until we put the filter on. My chickens still get mostly unfiltered because I often fill their water from a seperate well closer to the out buildings. I haven't noticed any problems or any difference the weeks they get filtered versus raw well water and our water is extremely hard with lots of iron.

 

[AndreaS]

It is really sad that all the pollution is in water everywhere

Fortunately, we don't live close to a city.

Our neighbor's have said that we have a lot of iron in our water, and we've installed a softener, but the chickens don't get water that's gone thru the softening system...it uses salt, so I thought best not to give them that. It would be too expensive to give them all bottled though.

Thanks for the responses! I will wait till we get our well tested if its not a pressing issue.

 

[RocketDad]

Quote:
Chickens will drink out of nasty mud puddles, even with clean water nearby. Don't worry about it too much.

 

[Paulo]

Chickens might well drink out of nasty mud puddles if they have to but that doesn't mean that it's good for them, nor that they like it. Up to recently i had been giving my birds water from the main, and when i started giving them (chlorine-free) water from a nearby mountain stream, their water consumption more than doubled. Overnight. Their instinct tells them it's better for them. One way of telling which water they prefer is to give them water from different sources and see which one they drink more.