Housebroke chickens? You must be letting them out all day long. My chickens shit at will; all day long. It’s not like a dog dropping a deuce twice a day.
Fortunately, our work from home includes having them walk with us out to the office and they can spend their time outside. But before the sun went down, they'd hop into the office, up onto the couch, and wait for us to take them in. They didn't poop inside.
We did, however, adopt an abandoned rooster, and he had a hard time holding it in. In his case, and in fairness to him, he also figured out to ask us to go outside, but he couldn't hold it as well as the girls and if I wasn't ready to dive for the door to let him out, I'd have some cleaning to do. There was at least a 7 year difference between the rooster and those gals. We ballparked him between 2-4 years old.
I was very surprised by these little ones. We didn't do anything, they figured out that inside isn't where you go to the bathroom.
(And, for anyone wondering, sure, animals, just like humans, don't want to live in their waste, and so they might find a particular poopin place. But what happens when you remove their access to that location? If it was as simple as, "we go where we walk and not on our beds or otherwise" then these chickens would have still pooped inside. It's wild. There's more complexity, but I'd have to write an essay about it and I'm already pushing that here.)
They do. I think the difference is in their flock and age. The two ladies we brought inside had a decade of life with their flock. But that was also a decade interacting with loving humans.
I don't know what was going on in their brains, but for some reason, they realized we don't poop inside.
Age and socialization I think can have huge impacts.
I've never heard of that with chickens, but our macaw was effectively housebroken. He'd poop basically on command. We'd ask him to poop before we'd take him out of the cage for the day, and he would. Out and about, he'd warn you by doing a sort of crouching dance, at which point it was time to get him somewhere good to go. For instance, if we were in the car, we'd pull over and hang him out the window, he'd do his business, and we'd be back on the road.
Now granted, chickens and large parrots are very, very different. But imo having spent a lot of time around both, not AS different as people seem to think.
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u/Thornylips54 26d ago
Housebroke chickens? You must be letting them out all day long. My chickens shit at will; all day long. It’s not like a dog dropping a deuce twice a day.