What Can Chickens Eat for Treats?

Most of us with chickens want to provide some treats as a supplement to their core food, either to encourage their trust or simply “just because”. Fiona & Hugh Osborne guide you through the options.

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WHY FEED TREATS

There are many reasons to feed treats to your chickens. If you're a backyard chicken keeper, it could simply be that you enjoy spending time with them and hand-feeding a few morsels. That's also true for many smallholders including us, but if your time is short and your chickens are with you as broilers or egg layers, there's still a good reason to give them treats. If your chickens escape and you need to get the back, if they recognise you as “the giver of treats” i.e. The Food God, it will be very easy to catch them and return them to where they need to be.

LEGAL RESTRICTIONS

It might surprise you to know that there are some legal restrictions around what food, including treats, that can be fed to chickens. If you're as old as we are, you might remember the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy a.k.a “Mad Cow Disease”) scandal in the 1980s and 1990's which linked the disease to outbreaks of CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) in humans. It was determined that the BSE outbreak in cattle was caused by cows being given feed that included animal matter infected with neurological diseases. It's still unclear whether this was prions from other infected cattle or Scrapie from infected sheep but either way, it was caused by meat proteins from infected animals being included in cattle feed. That it occurred seems ludicrous as cattle are herbivores, but nonetheless, it happened.

The scandal gave rise to new legislation which is still place today that prevents Animal By-Products (ABPs) being fed to livestock. Even if your chickens are kept as pets, all chickens in the UK are legally classed as livestock, so the rules apply to them.