This doesn’t necessarily hold up, when I look at it as a possible guide for our chickens.
A carton of Eggland’s Best advertises that the company uses “vegetarian fed hens.” Horizon promises that their eggs “come from hens that are fed a 100% organic, vegetarian diet.” Land O Lakes hens have a diet with no animal fat or by-products.
Yet for the chickens, who are natural omnivores that readily devour bugs and small animals when they’re available, the forced vegetarianism can be a disaster.
Chickens on an unsupplemented vegetarian diet typically fall short of an essential protein-based amino acid known as methionine, and without it, they fall ill. Worse, the birds will also turn on each other, pecking at each other in search of nutrients, and these incidents can escalate into a henhouse bloodbath, farmers say.
The first three Rhode Island Reds pecked each other bald their first year. Second year, Agnes the Red damn near killed her sister Selma. Once separated, Agnes got over it and Selma became a feather-puller. I’m still not convinced I wouldn’t be better off without her. Basically, all my Rhode Island Reds are violence prone though some more than others. I doubt it’s diet-related.
Landlady’s Brahmas went through a feather-pulling phase last year but much milder, and in general they’re just very laid-back birds. And they’re on a more vegetarian diet, since I raise the RIRs on a compost heap that attracts bugs and the Brahmas’ enclosure is more nearly sterile.
In short, ‘escalation into a henhouse bloodbath’ is something that can happen, but I’m not convinced it’s driven by diet.
Still, I’ve been throwing away a lot of perfectly good dead mice…
Yes indeed. Stop throwing away perfectly good dead mice. LOL Just not too much at a time at first. Most animals don’t benefit a lot from sudden diet changes.
When I had chickens they ate mice and toads fairly often. Sometimes I’d open the coop door or lift the waterer and a mouse would flee- they never got far. And toads would just turn up- not smart enough to hide, I guess. It was a little gory, but I suppose it made good eggs.
I know a guy (who once ran for Oregon governor on the libertarian ticket) who was the king of compost. One day his horse died. Rather than cart it to the dump, he just dragged it into the chicken coop and covered it with compost. The hens got to munch all the larvae that resulted.
I didn’t see this process, but he described it to me. I recall visiting his place. It was like walking on mattresses all the time; the compost was quite deep. He got it from the city leaf collection brigade…
Chickens are omnivores and delight in searching out their food. When I trim the household lawns the cuttings go in the chicken run. The damp grass encourages insects and worms and they scratch through it helping it compost as they go. Every couple of months we shovel it out and throw it in the main compost piles. Itis already cooking well.
If you build a wormery for your food waste, cheap to do see you tube, you’ll get a free supply of worms to chuck to them as well as a cheap waste disposal.
I know people down in PHX that keep chickens because they keep the ticks and such out of the hedges. As dry and clear as the ground is, I imagine the pickings are a little slim. Watching them attack bugs and dead mice really makes it apparent how closely they are descended from dinosaurs.