Oh, my!! Let me count the ways!!
My obvious observation is pasty butt - or lack thereof. We rarely see pasty butt with broody hen raised chicks. From the moment they are out of the egg, they tuck under her when the sun goes down and sleep all night through. I have ZERO scientific evidence to back up my theory, but it seems to me that to me that our working with their natural inclinations is the next best thing to her way. And because I raise chicks in a way that most closely duplicate hers, I have only had 3 chicks with pasty butt in the last 7 yearsl Those three were in the same batch and came here with it. A couple of cleanups and they were good as new. It wasn’t a recurring battle. With my first ever batch of 22 chicks, indoor-raised with a heat lamp, I felt like cleaning hineys was my full time job.
It’s a given that what we see in chicks points to every system being immature. Every system. That includes digestion. They hatch pre-programmed to eat during the day and sleep at night. Artificial lights don't provide for that. So they eat 24/7, overloading a digestive system that just isn’t programmed to handle that. Under a broody hen, they fill their crops one last time before sunset and that gives them all night long to slowly empty those tiny crops and digestive tracts. That slow, natural digestive process just has to make more sense than systems that are overloaded.
Now some might say that they only eat when they’re hungry. Not exactly true. They eat when they’re hungry, of course, but they also eat because in a typical brightly lit brooder box there’s really nothing else to do - no exploring, no real space, no place to hide from real or imagined threats. There’s just them, a feeder, and a waterer. They eat because they see others at the feeder, and we all know that chickens are opportunists….they simply eat what they find whenever they find it, and if one chicken finds a bonanza they all have to muscle their way in to get their share. In a lamp-heated brooder, there’s always somebody at the feed trough, and the chicks will gravitate there to join them whether they’re truly hungry or not.
Another issue is overheating. Raised by a broody hen, chicks run around in ambient temperatures checking everything out. When they need a quick warmup they seek her out, satisfy that need, then pop back out ready to explore some more. With heat lamps everything is warm….the walls, the floor, the bedding, the food, the water. People recommend making one end of the brooder warmer than the other. Well, unless the brooder is darn near the size of a small room, that’s just not possible. In fact, folks who set their brooders up in an unused bathtub often comment that the entire bathroom gets a tad too warm for comfort. The best achieved temperature difference in an average brooder is just a few degrees - so where exactly is that “cooler side”? As far as I’m concerned, while raising chicks in a plastic tote may make for easier cleaning, it also poses some risks. There’s no ventilation, for one thing. Plastic not only holds in heat, it also holds in stale, moist air. It holds in any off-gassing from hot plastic. It holds in ammonia. As a friend of mine once put it so well, a plastic tote is like putting them in an Easy Bake Oven. What’s an Easy Bake Oven but a plastic shell heated by a light bulb?
And then there’s stress. Both adults and chicks are prone to stress out easily. After all, just about everything is out to get a chicken dinner. When chicks in the average brooder (and again, we’re talking the old cardboard box, dog crate, or plastic tote that most people start out with), what can they do? They don’t care if the threat is real or imagined, the behavior is the same. They run in panic around the perimeter of the brooder and then pile up in a corner. There’s no Mom to duck under. There’s no bush to hide in. There is no safe place for them to hide. Instinct tells them that chicks on the outside of the pile are likely to be taken first, so they scramble to be in the middle of the heap. Chicks raised under a broody have options. Chicks raised in a box don’t. So they never learn to self-calm. There’s no opportunity for them to hide, be as silent as possible, then peak out to see if the coast is clear. My aim is to give them those spaces, those safety zones. The result is calmer, more confident chicks. They quickly learn that I’m not a threat and either ignore me or come over to say hi.
This is probably a lot more information than your question required. And I recognize that it’s a little (well, more than a little) biased toward a more natural approach to raising chicks. I’m not preaching to convert anyone to the way I do things. I don’t have that right. Each individual chooses a chick raising method that works best for them, and that’s as it should be. But if a two pound hen can raise her broods outdoors among the flock regardless of temperatures, and do it without heat lamps, books, charts, experts and web sites, why are we taught to do it so differently and think we’re doing it better?
This is all really interesting! I’d never heard this before but it makes sense, especially when we think about how light-sensitive most species are. There are Blind Moles, with no eyesight and skin covering their useless eyes, because spending most of their lives underground means they live in continual darkness with little to no light exposure. Then there are the light sensitive nocturnal animals. Shoot, even in our flocks we see this light dependency. Many choose to provide their flocks with 14-16 hours of light daily, supplementing the reduced winter daylight hours with artificial light to stimulate laying during a time when the pinural gland tells the hen’s bodies to shut down production to give her body a rest.
