Chicken food

Okay I'd like to present a topic that I have never seen before. And no, I don't want to give my parrots chicken food.

Chickens are parrots are very different. BUT they both do best when on a formulated diet with everything they need in one small kibble or pellet. Chickens are raised from babies on this crumbled pellet. This is the standard, not many people feed anything else. By doing this the chicks have absolutely no problem eating adult pellets when the time comes. Feeding them birdseed and corn is not as common of a process anymore. They don't sell too many brands of pellets and they are all about the same ingredients. This means that farmers have perfected their chickens pelleted diet.

Now onto parrots. A lot of breeders wean their babies onto seed because it is easy and pretty soon these babies will have no clue that pellets are edible. We know seed is bad as a main diet yet this continues to happen. Then there is the fact that we have so many different kinds of pellets to chose from. What the breeder feeds and what you want your bird to eat is probably different. I know first hand that switching to pellets can be impossible!

So my only point is if we could perfect the parrots staple diet like the chickens is then we'd have healthy birds that are eating what they need and then maybe egg binding wouldn't be such an issue.

This is just my thought. What do you think?

I think the main issue here boils down to evolutionary traits. Chickens have been a domesticated animal for thousands of years, and as such have changed over time to better survive in a domesticated environment. Their gut flora changed, how they digest things, and what the body put importance on changed.

Parrots, however, always have been and continue to be wild. We have hardly begun to domesticate them, and it takes hundreds if not thousands of years for these birds to undergo evolutionary changes like the chickens have. As it is now, their diets need to be quite similar to their wild diets, as it's obviously successful for them. Pellets have been researched for years now, but we still don't properly understand how pellets are long term (it's ridiculously hard to conduct a long term study on a large sample of parrots with a control group, especially with so many species).

Really, a staple diet for a parrot is what they eat in the wild, with the exercise they need included... and unfortunately that's often too difficult to emulate. As it is now, the best we can do is offer them he most natural food as possible (organic pellets, mostly fresh fruits and veggies, healthy proteins and fats) until researchers better understand parrot health. I do agree that it would be great if we already knew, though!

And, as a side note, agricultural research is a HUGE field because of the economical value... parrot research not so much.

I'm guilty of giving my birds layer pellets as an added source of calcium to my birds who are laying soft-shelled eggs-but never as a main part of the diet. I will, however, throw in a few laying pellets every now and then just for the heck of it to give the birds something different to eat or play with.

Please remember I had birds long before these fancy pellets were available, and I've always tried to supply natural food sources. And to be perfectly honest I'm not fond of pelleted diets-especially after the fiasco with dog and cat food being contaminated with whatever. Don't get me wrong I give pellets to supplement the diet-and give the birds something to piddle with. I'm a strong believer in doing research on the species and learning what the natural diet is and trying to copy it as close as I can.

With all the information we have today, there is really no need to feed chicken feed except as an occasional treat to prevent boredom.