Now that Schiller Park has banned the feeding of chickens at the last Board Meeting —-lets take a few minutes to learn about chickens !!!!!!!
July 29, 2010 – 8:07am
The Basics of What Chickens Need
For more detail, go also to the Recipes page and the Feed Instructions page.
Man has the dirtiest mouth of any animal. Getting bitten by a human is far more likely to lead to infection than any other kind of bite. Why? Because we eat more kinds of things than any other animal on earth. So, because there is a greater variety of food for organisms in our mouths, we have more kinds of organisms growing there than any other animal has.
Man has mastered all kinds of situations, and has grown to a very high degree of dietary versatility. Animals are not so “fortunate”. They must have very precise types of food, at precise times. Some more than others, of course. Domesticated animals, living with man for the last several millennia, have adapted to man’s diet to a far greater extent than wild animals.
Chickens are one of man’s closest domesticated friends. They, like dogs, have grown to eat many of the foods of their keepers. But chickens cannot be assumed to just “make it” on any kind of stuff. They will probably “make it” on man’s junk food, but they won’t be as healthy as they could be, nor will they be much good as egg layers, unless they are fed the basics of what they need. And mold or salt in table scraps and old grains can quickly kill a chicken.
WHAT CHICKENS NEED (It’s simple!)
1. Grains (whole, living grains are way better than cracked, and a mixture is way better than pure corn)
2. Greens (grass! weeds! fresh veggie parings from kitchen!)
3. Protein (in summer, they get enough bugs — but in colder weather they need protein supplementation, including perhaps the following: yellow-jackets from restaurant traps, soybeans — see below, worms, milk, meat — but sea fish is the very best)
And WATER, WATER, WATER.
Chickens won’t always search far for food or water. Sometimes they won’t even go around a see-through fence to get it. And they need lots of water, especially when laying. We put the water dish right by the door of their coop, where they can get it every time they go by. They can die of salt toxicity in a few hours if not given water at all times. They will shun dirty water, so make a point to keep it fresh using the BAMN method (By Any Means Necessary).
If they’re Fenceless Free Range, that’s about it. But if you keep them penned up most or all of the time, even in a largish yard, you will also need to make sure they get . . .
4. Hard grit (do not confuse this with oyster shell or calcium — these dissolve in the chicken’s digestive system, grit does not — grit is used in place of “teeth”); quartz-based sand with angular edges (not rounded, as often is found in riverbeds) can be collected wherever you find it.
5. Calcium (crushed oyster shell, other shells, ground or hammered bone) (There’s lots of calcium in greens, if they get to forage all day.)
6. Vitamins A (and D if the weather is cloudy for long stretches)
7. Salt (best given separately, free choice; kelp is the very supreme choice for this, if you can get it — it supplies all the minerals in the world — see below)
