I just got off the phone with my brother, who owns some horse property, and keeps some chickens and goats as well. He said he was just out feeding the chickens, and he picked up a piece of wood in the yard, and several small mice scurried out from under it. Well, he said one of the chickens pounced on a small mouse, ran around the yard with the mouse in her beak as the other chickens chased her, then swallowed the mouse whole! Has anybody ever heard of chickens eating mice this way before? Is it something they can digest in the gizzard, or is he going to find an egg with a tiny mammal skeleton inside?
Chickens will eat anything they can sling a beak on.
I had a similar experience to your brother’s. We kept the mash in a galvanized trash can. I took the lid off, grabbed the 2-pound coffee can kept therein and scooped up not quite a canful, and dumped it into the feeder. Out spilled a mouse who clung to the lip of the feeder – he must have been hiding in the can and gotten buried when I scooped the grain. Quicker than a blink, one of the hens grabbed it and spent around thirty seconds running around the henhouse with her ‘friends’ in hot pursuit until she could get in a protected corner. Three loud ‘thwacks’ a gulp, and that was the end of the mouse. I don’t know if it was intact or not when it went down.
My sister raised chickens in our backyard shed when we were younger. We kept a jug in the kitchen, any and all food scraps went into the jug and the chickens would happily chow down on the contents.
Including chicken scraps. They’re cannibals if given the opportunity.
We had some free range chickens when I was a kid, it was not unusual to see their beaks coated with slime from eating slugs. Even grosser was watching half a dozen chickens totally dismantle a pile of fresh horse crap looking for anything edible that passed through the horse. On the few occasion we ate these chickens, my mom could not figure out why we did not want to eat them.
“But Mom, that chicken was eating horse crap yesterday!”
I scarcely know scratch about chickens. I’d read about their voracious appetite for all sorts of bugs, but I had no idea that their gullets were wide enough to scarf down something as big as a mouse without choking to death. :eek: I’m not sure that I could gulp down something that big without chewing it first (and forming an easy-to-swallow bolus, and thanks to my high-school biology class for that vocabulary word).
What next, I wonder? Anacondas swallowing whole medium-sized crocodiles? Pelicans gulping pigeons? Some 7-foot-9-inch-tall Chinese guy reaching with his arm down the throats of a couple of distressed dolphins to extract indigestible garbage from their stomachs? [Emily Litella]What? Never mind, then.[/EL] :o
Never saw a *chicken swallow a mouse, but I did see a duck swallow a frog once.
*But as has been stated, a chicken will eat anything they can sing their beak into.
If the chicken can’t digest it, it’s still not going to appear inside an egg.
I have free range chickens, about 20 or so. A couple of weeks ago I was throwing scratch around when I had a real sharp, intense pain in my chest, all I could think of was the local newspaper story “Man has paralyzing stroke and is eaten alive by his chickens” :smack:
Cannibal chickens? Yes. If a chicken in a flock gets enough of an injury to bleed, the other chickens will turn on their wounded sister, pecking her to death and eating part of the fresh carcass.
Farmers have tried red pince-nez glasses and contact lenses to prevent the “pecking parties.” They worked, but they’re a lot of trouble for the occasional lost hen, so they never caught on. Most farmers just accept the loss, instead.
I didn’t believe it when I first heard about it, but it’s true.
We used to have chickens too and I’ve seen it happen. We had to pen the birds once when ‘The Friendly Neighborhood Hawk’ attacked one of them. While they were in the pen one of them dissappeared. After a close look, all that was left were some skeleton parts and the feet stomped into the woodchips. Don’t know what provoked the frenzy, but we assume all the living birds were in on it.
Another time one of the birds had the top of her head pecked to the bone, her crown and feathers were all gone. We attended to her with medical aid and she has since recovered and is a great little mother and egg layer (FIL has all our birds now).