The staple of our chickens’ diet is pellet feed designed for laying hens. They get lots of snacks too — mealworm, lettuce, yogurt, plus dandelion greens and grass clippings and backyard raspberries during the summer — but pellets are the main course.
Believe it or not, Snow, Nellie and Hope have preferences when it comes to how their pellets are served. Their least favorite arrangement involves the feed bowl. All three hens will eat from their bowl if they have to, but "the girls" aren’t big fans. They even knock it over with some regularity, presumably to dump the pellets onto the ground.
Which brings us to the second of their three options. Chickens love to scratch and peck in search of bugs and other edibles, and that applies to pellets as well. Given their druthers, they’d rather eat off the ground than from a bowl. That’s why I scatter some of their pellets first thing in the morning. But that option, while preferable to dipping their beaks into a container, is not the best one.
Their favorite? Being hand-fed. If I grab a bunch of pellets and lower my open palm into the pen, all three hens race over and peck feverishly at my hand, gobbling up the contents in no time flat. I can do this over and over again and they will not tire of it.
Are they attracted to the softness of my palm? Does my hand carry a scent that they find appealing? Is it the novelty that intrigues them? There is another possibility, and it may be the most likely. Perhaps they enjoy being fed by hand simply because they like human contact.
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