Can Chickens Eat Bacon Grease?

The first time I met my wife Chris (also known as our livestock manager), she told me she had been a vegetarian for a number of years. I asked her why she had turned bad again and started eating meat (but not our chickens).

She said there were two reasons. First, socializing had been difficult. Some dinner party hosts thought she would be happy with a minimalist salad. Second, potlucks were unlucky affairs.

This was decades ago, a time when general knowledge about vegetarianism was limited. During those old, backward days, I told my sister over the phone, that my girlfriend-at-the-time was a vegetarian. She took a moment to think about what she would make for dinner when we came to visit. Then she asked, “Can she eat rice?”.

Since then, people’s knowledge and acceptance of vegetarianism have grown at about the same rate as the number of people who keep chickens in their yards. At some point, it looks like some chicken keepers got the two ideas mixed up and now think that chickens also have a culture of being vegetarian.

I mean, the ingredients on the bags of some organic chicken feed don’t list any animal products, right?

Granted, everyone knows that chickens eat bugs in addition to seeds, fruits and greens. But I believe that most people don’t think of bugs as meat. This is why the idea that our cute little hens are basically peaceful vegetarians has become common in some places.

But chickens are really just pocket-sized dinosaurs, descended as they are from mouthy beasts such as Tyrannosaurus rex. If you’ve ever seen a chicken chase, catch, and eat a toad or mouse, you might think its Latin name is Tyrannosaurus pecks.

If there aren’t many toads or mice in your yard, you can give your hens a bag of live crickets from a pet store or bait shop to chase. You can then have a cricket rodeo in your backyard.

A colleague of mine described what he thought of as a four-layered food pyramid for chickens.

But I think that’s incomplete. It makes more sense to think of our hens’ food pyramid as having five levels. At the top is: meat.

My wife and I let our chickens pick clean the bones of lamb, pork, and beef to feed them meat. We don’t give them poultry bones. That would be weird.

They also get in a tizzy for shrimp shells, lobster shells and fish skins. We haven’t noticed those aromatic scraps messing up the eggs’ flavors at all.

Another reason my wife gave up vegetarianism? She missed bacon. And, it appears, so do our chickens. I’m from the South, so I need my daily pork products. When I cook a lot of bacon, I pour the hot, liquid bacon fat into two small bowls. This goes into the fridge to solidify.

We keep one bowl to cook with, and we give the other to our chickens. People who live next door have even been taught to give the chickens bacon fat in exchange for a few eggs.

I’m sure some readers cringed at the mention of bacon fat. My Yankee wife didn’t want it in the house. But she came around when I pointed out how many of the chefs she admires cook with it.

If American kitchens don’t use bacon fat for cooking or feed it to animals, it either goes down the drain or ends up in the trash. Did you know that fat from food companies and restaurants often gets added to animal feed?.

When fat is poured down kitchen drains, it forms “fatbergs,” which are solidified fat blobs that cause sewer pipes to back up. That’s just as yucky as it sounds. I recommend that you don’t look online for photos of fatbergs. You can’t unsee those s.

Fat and other organic matter in the landfill isn’t much better. It turns into methane gas that escapes into the atmosphere. Methane is even worse than carbon dioxide from your car at changing the climate in a way that melts ice caps and makes natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes worse.

To sum up, turning extra bacon fat (and other cooking fats) into tasty fresh eggs is not only a good idea, it’s also the right thing to do for the environment.

I’m not worried that our birds will get too much salt from these drippings. They pace themselves. That little bowl of fat lasts two or three days. As omnivores, chickens like to switch things up. The birds eat a lot of bacon fat and then either scratch for bugs, pick through our kitchen scraps, or beak-tap the vermin-proof 5-gallon bucket “vending machine” for some organic layer pellets.

Historically, chickens were never vegetarians. Even as Southeast Asian jungle birds millennia ago, they were opportunistic omnivores, like us. And their food decisions only had to meet four opportunistic criteria.

And chickens’ diverse dietary tastes aren’t unique. Surprisingly, the division between herbivores and omnivores in the natural world isn’t as clear-cut as we once thought. It’s more of a spectrum than a yes-or-no option.

Animals like deer, antelope, cows, horses, hippos, orangutans, chimps, gorillas, squirrels, elephants, manatees, kangaroos, goats, giraffes, and even rabbits have been caught on film eating fish, birds, and mammals. Those videos can be found online.

Evolution has always favored animals that are opportunists over the picky eaters. Two of the most endangered animals on earth are koalas and panda bears. The first only eats a few species of eucalyptus leaves. And the second is mostly jonesing for a few species of bamboo shoots and leaves.

Animals that are interested in a lot of different kinds of food are more likely to be able to survive the unpredictable seasons and changing weather that existed before humans changed it.

I’m not saying that if your household is vegetarian, you have to feed meat to your chickens. I’m just saying that your chickens would enjoy the kind of openness that lets your neighbors earn some eggs and help the environment by putting their used meat scraps in your hen pen.

Cracked Corn and Bacon Grease Treat for the Chickens

Can chickens eat coconut oil?

To feed coconut oil to your chickens, you can mix a spoonful of coconut oil and add it to your pet’s regular feed. You can also coat their fruits and vegetables in coconut oil to harness its healing properties. Coconut oil can be added to their superfoods, meals, and every other chicken feed in small quantities. Can Chickens Drink Coconut Milk?

Do you eat bacon?

Bacon chops. We very seldom eat processed meats such as bacon, even though we really love it (and who doesn’t!) Every once in a while I will cook us some bacon for breakfast/supper. We will either have it in the form of rashers or as these lovely bacon chops which we get from the butcher.

Are chickens poisonous?

Chickens can easily become poisoned by common foods they pick up while free-ranging. From small pieces of plastic to bits of tomato plants, there are so many materials that can prove to be toxic to chickens. This toxicity comes on rapidly, and often, the chicken shows no sign of digestive upset or distress before it dies. 4. Trauma

Can chickens eat corn cobs?

Corn on the cob would bring many benefits for your animal health in many aspects. In addition, you can offer different types of corn cobs for your poultries so that you can make their meals more diversified. About chickens, it is not difficult to select suitable foods for them because they are not too picky. But how about eating corn cobs?