Chicken pecking… also known as cannibalism, can be a big source of future problems for your chicken flock.
So, don’t delay when one of your birds becomes injured, or picked, and begins to bleed. Treat her at once with a good anti-pick remedy.
If at all possible, keep her away from the flock until her wounds have healed.
You definitely don’t want to give your birds a chance to become cannibals.
Kelson
In a recent study, a university tried to find out if eating raw potatoes could help make their food supply last longer for less cost.
According to their tests feeding raw potatoes did not have any saving effect on the amount of mash consumed by hens. Evidently, the raw potatoes simply passed through the digestive tract, virtually unused.
However, slightly more satisfactory results were obtained from cooked potatoes. They were mixed with the mash, and fed as a wet mash once a day. Cooked potatoes provided no advantage over potato flakes, as a constituent of the poultry diet; however, potato flakes appear to be more tasty, and to keep better.
So, flakes appear to be the most economical way of utilizing extra potatoes — although you won’t get as good of results this way as you would with regular chicken feed.
About 2 ounces of cooked potatoes per day reduced their production by 5%, when compared with the
test lot, receiving about one third the amount of cooked potatoes. So, although it might seem like a good idea to use cooked potatoes (or potato flakes) to stretch your chicken feed — just be aware it could have a slight impact on your hens output.
Kelson
This just happens to be one of the questions we get asked every once in a while.
Tame chickens can make very good family pets. They are relatively low maintenance, and people generally enjoy spending a few minutes with their hens during their day.
However, smaller chickens (such as bantams) are recommended for small children because they are usually gentler and more docile. There’s quite a bit more that I can say about this, but I don’t want to bore you too much.
Leading from our above discussion … another question a new chicken owner might ask is …
How do you tame a chicken?
Again, a great question. In general, most chickens are “tamed” by regular human contact from the moment they are hatched.
It is possible to tame a “wild” chicken, but it does take a lot of time and effort. For example, gradually get closer to them while feeding, and during the coming days / weeks, gradually move to hand feeding them, and then patting them during feeding, and so on.
All the best,
Kelson