In this enlightening episode of “Speaking of Pets,” host Alice is joined by Dr. Maurice Pitesky, a poultry expert, to delve into the fascinating world of backyard chickens. As interest in raising chickens as pets rises across the country, Dr. Pitesky answers a variety of viewer-submitted questions, shedding light on the joys and complexities of chicken ownership.
From understanding the popularity of backyard chickens and their social dynamics to the nuances of chicken breeds and their care, this episode covers a wide range of topics. Alice and Dr. Pitesky discuss the importance of proper husbandry, the challenges of introducing new hens to an established flock, and the common diseases chickens face, including Marek’s disease and coccidiosis.
Listeners will gain insights into the economics of chicken keeping, the significance of zoning laws, and the potential health risks associated with backyard poultry, including salmonella and avian influenza. Dr. Pitesky emphasizes the importance of sourcing healthy chicks and shares advice on how to ensure your flock thrives.
Whether you’re a seasoned chicken keeper or just curious about these charming pets, this episode is packed with valuable information and expert advice. Join us for a clucking good time and learn how to navigate the delightful, yet sometimes challenging, world of backyard chickens!
Check out UC ANR Our Team Poultry for more information.
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All footage is owned by SLA Video Productions.
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How To Raise Healthy Backyard Chickens – Dr. Maurice Pitesky
Welcome to Speaking of Pets. I’m Dr. Alice Novotny Jeromin, a board-certified veterinary dermatologist. My lovely co-host, Janet Novotny King, will not be with us. She has a prior engagement, but she’ll be back. That’ll be a lot of fun. We have been getting so many questions about backyard chickens. Do they make good pets? What do I need to feed them? What about the bird flu? What’s the latest?
We went right to the source. Dr. Maurice Pitesky is an Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension at UC Davis College of Veterinary Medicine with an appointment in poultry health and food safety epidemiology. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology from UCLA and his veterinary degree and his Master’s of Preventive Veterinary Medicine from UC Davis.
He is our go-to person to ask about keeping chickens as pets, what’s the latest in bird flu, and everything we wanted to know about backyard poultry. Thanks, Dr. Pitesky, for being here. We have so many questions from the audience about having chickens as pets. I thought, as I told our audience earlier, I’m going right to the source to ask you a million chicken questions that people have submitted. Please bear with us.
Thanks for having me.
How popular are backyard chickens? Is this a rage all over the country or certain regions?
We know anecdotally that backyard chickens are very popular and that they’re having a moment. We don’t know exactly how many there are. I’m from California. If you do some of the back-of-the-envelope calculations, you usually get to a number around 100,000 different backyard premises throughout the state. We have a climate that’s probably conducive to that with a large population. You can extrapolate.
There have been a few studies that have been done throughout the country in backyard poultry hotbeds, such as Los Angeles, Miami, and a couple of other urban areas. It’s popular. What’s happened with egg prices seems to cause increased interest. We’re in the springtime. That’s when people usually purchase chicks, people who already have backyard birds. All those things have combined to probably peak interest at this point in backyard poultry for all kinds of reasons, including some economic reasons because of egg prices.
Popularity And Nuances Of Backyard Chicken Ownership
That’s why I also wanted to interview you, because people think, “Eggs are so expensive. I can just get a couple of chickens and put them in the backyard.” There’s more to it than that. I hope that people respect that. I’m from Ohio. I’m in Florida now, but some of my friends in Ohio have pet chickens. They sit on their shoulder. A funny story, I went with a friend. She sells antique bamboo furniture. It’s out in the country here in Florida. When I got there, there was a rooster. The owner of the bamboo shop was following it around with a tennis racket because, apparently, it attacks people. Is that a common thing? Are roosters mean?
This is all the nuance that you’re alluding to. Many of your audience but maybe not everyone realize it’s not as simple as putting your chickens in the backyard and waiting for the eggs to start coming. Chickens are relatively low-maintenance. To your point, if you’re just purchasing eggs for economic reasons, you’re probably going to be in a little over your head as far as the time investment. They’re relatively easy to raise, but they do take some effort, knowledge, purpose, and things like that or else you’re going to get yourself in a pickle at some level.
Chickens are relatively low-maintenance and easy to raise, but they still require effort, knowledge, and purpose—or you may find yourself in a pickle. Share on XTo your specific question, roosters can be very aggressive. There’s nothing wrong with having a rooster in a flock. It helps with flock dynamics in some situations. They can be protective of predators. As we all intuitively know, roosters can be loud, so many urban areas have noise ordinances and rules against roosters. We have a problem in the backyard poultry world. When you order your chicks from any kind of source, they’re sexed.
Typically, most backyard people want eggs. Roosters don’t produce eggs, so roosters are not as valuable. In many cases, they’re undesirable because of the noise, for example, and because of how aggressive they can be in certain situations. People are pretty consistently emailing me or calling me, saying what they can do with their roosters. The reality is that even when you order your chicks, when they sex them, they can be wrong every once in a while.
The ability for them to sex them is amazing. You’re talking over 99% in most cases, but it’s not perfect. Every once in a while, you get a rooster. No one knows what to do with them in a backyard world. In a commercial world, those roosters will be euthanized in the laying world because they’re not productive at that point unless we’re on a breeding farm and we need to hatch genetic stock and things like that.
Not to get too technical, but for my own edification, how do they do the sexing of the chicks?
I can’t do it. It’s still done by humans for the most part. We do know, just like in the dairy industry, we can sex the semen and then use artificial insemination. The economics of that don’t work out yet for the most part. It’s still done by humans. I believe historically, for some reason, it’s the Hmong and the Vietnamese women who typically have flocked, no pun intended, to this specific niche of the poultry industry. They’re amazing at it.
I’ve seen them do it. They try to show me how to do it. I didn’t feel anything. There are some breeds that are sexed in the sense that they have physical characteristics, which you can see. You’ll know if they’re male or female based on feather colors and things like that. Those are great, but those are not the commercial breeds. The great part about backyard poultry, though, is that there are hundreds of breeds of backyard chickens.
People can be very deliberate about which breeds they want to select for because of behavior, feathers, sexing, and all those types of things. The hatchery will do everything for you. Usually, they’ll feel and palpate around the cloaca. They can feel some of the anatomy. In all honesty, I’m pretty ignorant of what they feel for it. It’s a niche area.
I’m chuckling because the old tv show from the ‘50s, What’s My Line, would have guests on and show the audience what the occupation was. Could you imagine a chicken sexer? They would never guess that. This isn’t one of the questions that our audience asks, but I’m just curious myself. All these different breeds of chickens, the eggs they lay, do they taste different? I’m sure they look different because my friends who have pet chickens give me some adorable eggs.
There are these breeds, like Ameraucanas, for example, that have produced these bluish eggs on the shell. The dogma is that the color of the ears correlates with the egg color. When you’re looking at Rhode Island Reds, they’ve got brown ears. They’ll make these beautiful tannish brownish shells and so on. The interesting thing is that when you look at the commercial poultry industry, there are just a few breeds that the commercial folks will use because they’re looking for the ones that are going to produce the most amount of eggs every single year for the least amount of feed.
Where it gets fascinating and fun is when you look at the backyard folks and all the different breeds of chickens they have. My personal favorite is the Polish breeds because they look almost like an Albert Einstein-type hen. They’re quirky-looking. They all have slightly different behaviors. There are the Bantams, which are a little smaller. The backyard folks will usually recommend Bantams for families with young children, for example.
You want to stay away from roosters, in a general sense, around young children. To that point, around young children. The CDC recommends that if you’re under ten, you shouldn’t be handling birds because they have a tendency to touch their mouths, eyes, and conjunctiva. These birds can be natural carriers of Salmonella, among other bacteria. The sky’s the limit. There are hundreds of breeds.
When you think about chickens, when they were originally domesticated years ago in the Indus Valley in India, they were originally domesticated for fighting. In our culture, that’s on the no-no list. If you go to other parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, that’s still culturally acceptable. There are parts of the United States where those things still percolate.
My point is, they were originally bred for fighting and also for the beautiful feathers that they had. Over thousands of years, we’ve domesticated, selected for, and created hundreds of breeds. There are some amazing choices for people to have, as far as all the different feathers and things like that. The one thing, when people are just interested in eggs, that could be part of your motivation for selecting a breed.
A Rhode Island Red is almost like the Toyota Camry of laying hens. When you start getting to some of these quirkier breeds, you might get some beautiful feathers and some interesting eggs, but you won’t get as many eggs. The productivity will be a little decreased. That’s not the main motivation for many people who have backyard chickens.
Off the top of your head, what breed is the friendliest? What would you get with children, where you wouldn’t worry about them?
People like the Bantams. The Bantams are the smaller version of each breed. Most chickens are nice. The only breed I’ve ever heard of people having problems with is a breed that’s Egyptian, called Fayoumi. They’re interesting because they have some disease resistance to a disease called coccidia, among other diseases. They’re interesting from a scientific perspective. I’ve heard that they can be a little flighty and a little aggressive.
That being said, a flighty, aggressive hen compared to other animals, like you might think about dog breeds or things like that that sometimes can be aggressive around kids. I don’t worry about that too much. I would say it’s important to respect roosters, though. Roosters can be very aggressive. Every once in a while, you hear about someone dying from being attacked by a rooster. It’s probably a fighting bird, and those birds will go for your jugular.
I was on a ranch trying to find some information about fighting birds for a different project. I was ignorant of how aggressive they can be. The bird was tied to a post. It jumped at me. It was going for my neck. I was far enough away, but I was also like, “I get how someone could have been attacked and even killed by these roosters.” That’s a very rare situation. Roosters in general aren’t that way, but they will be a little aggressive. The noise issue is probably the biggest issue that folks deal with.
Speaking of the noise issue, wouldn’t you recommend that if you’re going to get backyard chickens, you need to check with zoning? I know in Sanibel, there’s no way I could have a backyard chicken. It would be the news of the island.
Zoning, Husbandry, And Flock Dynamics
Most cities do have rules. It’s important to look at those ordinances. Usually, what they’re trying to control for is noise and smell. You don’t want to have one chicken because they’re social animals. They need to be around others, but you can have two or three, whatever is within the ordinance. If you don’t do a good job, you’ll have some odor issues and sometimes even some noise issues. You want to practice good husbandry in addition to following those rules, and then you won’t have neighbors complaining to you.
You don’t want just one chicken—they’re social animals and need companionship. Two or three chickens, within local ordinances, is a much better fit. Share on XIs there a pecking order? Is there a caste system for chickens?
I like the term caste. There absolutely is. There are ways to mitigate that. Some of that’s just their natural behavior. For example, if I’ve got ten birds and I only have enough feed for five of them, and enough water for five of them, as far as space and what I’m allowing them, they will devolve into that caste system. There are ways to mitigate that, though. If we make sure there are enough feeders for all of our birds, enough perch space for all of our birds, enough water, etc. We can mitigate any aggressive behavior that might ensue from limited resources.
I’m retired. Sometimes, when I go to these group functions, there are little groups. This one doesn’t have anything to do with that one. I’m thinking, provided they have enough food and water, and you’ve got maybe ten hens, and I’m bringing a new one in. Could that be a disaster socially? Not with the food and water. Do you have to be careful?
A couple of things, because that’s a very common situation where someone will have their flock and then somehow, they’ll want to introduce cliques. They’ll have cliques, and then you’re bringing something new into that flock. That’s a common scenario because of the way backyard bird ownership works. They see a hen. They want another bird and all that kind of stuff. Long story short, first of all, you want to quarantine any new birds that you have because you don’t know.
I read that. It said quarantine for 30 days. Is that true?
People who say 30 days, you’re hoping they do 10 or 15 days. The whole goal is to quarantine them long enough. I would say at least 7 to 10 days, so that you know that the birds aren’t having any GI problems, respiratory problems, or any infectious diseases that you might be bringing into your flock. That’s the whole goal of the quarantine. A lot of people don’t follow that. The next challenge is when you bring those new birds into your flock, what’s behaviorally going to go on? It’s because we’re resetting the caste or the pecking order. In that scenario, there can be challenges, too. Again, ways to mitigate that are offering enough feed and water and perch space.
It’s like, “Calm down. Don’t worry. There’s enough for everybody.”
Some people suggest adding new enrichments at the same time, like adding a bale of hay, to distract everyone from the new birds. Some people have anecdotally suggested that if you put them in at night when all the birds are sleeping, in the morning, they don’t seem to be as observant. They just shrug their shoulders a little. The only problem with that is if that’s not the result, then you need to keep a close eye so you can separate the birds. Ideally, getting birds of about the same size is going to mitigate that. That’s probably an important factor.
That’s complicated. It goes to show you how much emotion any animal has. I don’t think humans respect that.
I don’t think we always appreciate how much our partners that we’re living with, how much they know, whether they’re wild animals or domesticated animals. They are probably a lot smarter than we give them credit for, to your point.
Are the main diseases they get upper respiratory and gastrointestinal? If I have a flock, what do I need to keep my eye on?
The biggest disease that backyarders typically deal with, which is 99.9% preventable, is a virus called Marek’s disease. It’s a herpes virus. We have a very good vaccine for it. The challenge is that the vaccine can only be given, for it to be effective, at day of age, when the chick hatches, because the herpes virus is considered ubiquitous in the environment. Our chicks are being exposed to it right when they hatch. The reality is that most, if not almost all, backyard birds are not vaccinated against Marek’s disease. The commercial poultry industry, to their credit, does vaccinate, and it’s effective.
Is that oral?
It’s injectable. It’s very easy to give. We have a YouTube video that our lab has made at UC Davis to show how the vaccine can be given. It has to be given at day of age. If you give it on day two, it’s not like your chicken will turn into a pumpkin or anything, but it won’t be as effective. There are two ways to handle that. One, you do it yourself at day of age. The other is to deal with hatcheries and feed stores that will vaccinate.
If I, Maurice Pitesky from UC Davis, tell the hatcheries, “You should vaccinate against Marek’s.” They’ll shrug their shoulders because I’m not their customer. If your audience starts putting pressure on them and saying, “I’m not buying your birds unless you vaccinate them at day of age.” They’ll then start moving in that direction. That’s been a challenge. The number one cause of backyard poultry mortality is that there’s no cure for it. Not even apple cider vinegar, which, for some reason, seems to be the panacea for everything in many animals.
I drank that as a kid because my mother was into natural hygiene, so I know all about apple cider. It has to have the mother in it. It’s the crap that floats at the bottom.
That is one disease where we can make a huge impact on. The other thing people should know is that the virus is in the highest concentration in the feather follicle. If I have chicks and I’m eventually putting them from the brooder into the coop, even if they’re vaccinated, after I’ve had a vaccine, I don’t want to go into an area with a bunch of flu or COVID. I want to reduce the amount that’s in the environment around me.
The same thing with Marek’s. You vaccinate against Marek’s. When you introduce your vaccinated birds into the flock, you want to get rid of all those feather follicles so you reduce the amount of virus in the environment they’re exposed to. Those are the two things you can do to reduce the probability of your birds getting Marek’s. There is no cure for Marek’s, unfortunately.
For our audience, is Marek’s not contagious to humans?
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza And Zoonotic Risks
No, it is not contagious to humans. For humans, the big issues we deal with chickens are Salmonella and Campylobacter. Unfortunately, we’re also dealing with highly pathogenic avian influenza. There was a senior who was healthy otherwise who died from exposure to highly pathogenic AI from their backyard chickens in Louisiana. It’s a serious thing.
I read that three cat owners are suing the raw diet that their cats were being fed. They’re suing that company, claiming that the diet said it was safe. Their cats died. I also get that, as a pet owner, and that’s the purpose of this show, you need to search out accurate science-based information. There are a lot of things that a raw diet carries. As of late, that’s one of them.
I did not realize that was a thing, that people were giving their domestic cats raw turkey. I would be very concerned about all kinds of diseases in addition to avian influenza. I know this is a controversial topic, but just because we did this 10,000 years ago doesn’t mean we should be doing it now. There is a significant risk. The problem with doing that with cats is that cats get close to your face. We have seen on many dairies a lot of feral cats dying from exposure to contaminated milk. While we haven’t had that situation happen in humans, cats are mammals, and we’re mammals.
This virus has an amazing capacity to reassort and mutate. The connecting of the dots from an infected cat to an infected human or infected milk to a susceptible human is not a very big leap. Even though it hasn’t happened yet, I’m not the kind of person that I want to wait until ten people get infected with highly pathogenic AI from raw milk or from their cats eating raw turkey before I say, “We shouldn’t do this anymore.” We know that’s a high-probability event. It has not happened yet as far as we know, but it is not a leap to assume that it will happen at some point.
The more I read about this, the more it looks like cats are the canary in the coal mine on these dairy farms. Once these cats start to die, it’s very sad for that purpose, but it’s trying to tell us something.
The cats are probably going to expose a couple of routes. Cats are great hunters. Cats are on farms for a good reason. Even though that’s not technically allowed, but they’re very good at catching rodents. They’re good at scaring away birds. Those are two things that can carry other diseases into these dairies and poultry facilities. There are other ways we do that now, but as someone who’s been on a lot of farms and talked to a lot of farmers, cats are good at what they do. They can be protective.
Cats are often kept on farms for a reason. Even if it’s not technically allowed, they help control rodents and scare away birds—both of which can carry disease into dairies and poultry facilities. Share on XThere are challenges with that, but there’s a lot of value in what a cat can provide. That’s on a farm. By having cats domestically exposed to all kinds of diseases, while they’re the canary in the coal mine, to your point, we can potentially be the person who’s most susceptible to being exposed to various diseases. The raw turkey thing to me is a risk that has no value to it, as far as exposing our pets, our loved ones, to those kinds of diseases.
I was also reading that the virus has more receptors in cats in the lung tissue and neuro, respiratory and neurology. It’s fascinating to me, first of all, how different cats are from dogs and the other species we deal with, but they’re so much more sensitive to certain things.
The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, the version of it that we’re dealing with now globally, is incredible in its ability to affect wild birds, domestic birds, wild mammals, and domestic mammals. We’re finding it in human wastewater. We’re finding it in lagoons and wetlands. It is ubiquitous. In my opinion, we’re dealing with an endemic virus at this point that we’re going to have to learn to live with.
It is extraordinary in how it’s moved. If we were talking years ago, we would talk about wild waterfowl. We would talk about poultry. We’re talking about cats, dogs, albatross, sea lions, and dairy cows. It’s incredible what is going on. We’ve never seen anything like this as far as any infectious disease, in my opinion.
I read that France is the only one vaccinating. They’re vaccinating ducks. Is that for this flu or flu in general?
The French are vaccinating their duck population. In French cuisine, they probably eat more ducks than we do in the United States. Ducks are highly susceptible. They’re domestic waterfowl. There are other countries that vaccinate, such as China, Vietnam, Egypt, and Mexico. There is some data out there on how vaccination could work and how it could be useful, but there’s a lot of politics and science that’s driving the bus in the United States. We’re still trying to figure out where vaccination could potentially fit in.
The French do vaccinate. It’s an injection. I believe they have to give it twice. The logistics of that in the United States would be very hard. We’re the largest exporter and poultry producer in the world, or one of the top three, depending on how you look at it. We produce about eight billion broilers a year. We have over 300 million laying hens and hundreds of millions of turkeys. If we’re going to do this, we need to be strategic about it because the logistics of doing all those birds would be challenging, for multiple reasons, including the actual vaccination.
Since the wild bird population can expose backyard chickens to this, is there any way to keep where you’re housing these chickens out of wild bird exposure? I see sparrows getting into everything.
Strategic Habitat Creation And Biosecurity Challenges
That’s the research that I do. Long story short, we have about 44,000 commercial poultry facilities in the US, another 20,000 plus dairies, and another 60,000 commercial swine facilities. Historically, the locations of those farms are based on the cost of the land. You want inexpensive land to put a farm on. You want it to be flat because it’s easier to work on that type of flatness. You also want proximity to railroad tracks, so you can ship corn, soy, eggs, and meat back and forth.
We’ve never historically thought, unfortunately, about where these farms are relative to waterfowl habitat, migration, and all those things. I’m from California, for example. We’ve lost 95% of our natural wetlands. What that means for the millions of waterfowl that are present in the Central Valley of California, where we have 1,000 dairies and 600 poultry facilities, is that we have a lot of suboptimal habitats, where 6 million to 8 million waterfowl every fall and spring are hanging out.
One conceptual idea that myself and others are working on is how we can create and reflood habitat away from these facilities strategically, with the goal of reducing the potential for disease transmission between wild waterfowl, the primary reservoir of highly pathogenic AI, and commercial poultry and dairy operations. This is important work. It’s hard in the sense that we are reflooding some habitats in California, but we’re not doing it strategically, getting people to think in that ecosystem-based approach.
As Americans, we want quick solutions. Whenever I talk to any stakeholders, they want to know what the answer is. I don’t think there are short-term answers. I do think there are some middle-to-long-term answers. One of the things that we need to do a better job of is strategically reflooding and recreating habitat, which we know how to do, away from some of these locations.
If you have a million laying hens on a facility, and you’ve got wetlands or lagoons right on that facility, all the lasers in the world aren’t going to push those birds. Water cannons and things like that aren’t going to push those birds off that land. If we create habitat strategically away from that facility, then we can reduce the potential for disease transmission that way.
It’s like, “No time like the present. Let’s get started on that,” kind of stuff. I can’t stand when you’ve got a good idea, and it takes years and years to get taken off.
I’m a researcher. I’m a veterinarian, also. I work with a lot of folks at the state, federal, and industry levels. It is almost an exercise in psychology and behavior, trying to change the way that we approach the problem. We’re three-plus years into this outbreak. We keep doing the same thing over and over again and repackaging it one way or the other. We need to be a little more creative, in my opinion. To that point, we need some new people to reconsider how we farm in some ways. Our dairy operations, for example, don’t have any physical biosecurity. Birds just go in and out.
That’s a real problem. Our lab does a lot of remote sensing using all kinds of different approaches. We do have all kinds of data that show that the birds are moving. These waterfowl are going right into where these dairy cows are eating. They can spread disease easily that way. There are ways to figure this out, but it’ll take some changes in behavior on our side, which is easier said than done as humans.
You and I, as veterinarians, have all been to dairy farms as part of our training and things. We need to take the state and federal officials to a dairy farm. They don’t realize what you and I realize when you walk onto it. They have no clue. They’re in an office somewhere, probably a lawyer, and have no science background. I’m sorry if I offended any lawyers, but we need more science people in legislation.
It’s a real problem. Whatever your politics are, they’re not relevant for this. I agree that we need more science people in decision-making positions, and not just more veterinarians. We need more waterfowl biologists. We need more people who are epidemiologists. We even need more engineers and people who are architects because we need to redesign how we’re doing this or else we’re going to keep on cycling through this year after year. That’s when egg prices start going up, for example.
Also, one of my main things, I was on an AVMA committee council on Biologics and Therapeutics. I don’t like it when we have a good idea and a good discussion, and then it gets tabled. It gets tabled down month after month. When are we going to reach a conclusion on this? Enough talk. Let’s start doing. What if one of our readers finds a dead bird? I know that’s a general question, but I found one here in Sanibel.
I found a dead cormorant on the driveway across the street. I volunteered with the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife here or CROW. I said, “I’ll bury this bird, but tell me, do you guys want to look at it and check it for avian flu?” Their response was, “It’s a cormorant. It doesn’t affect them.” That did not sound right to me. What do people do when they find a dead bird?
It’s very practical. Let’s say it’s a backyard chicken. Let’s start there and move to the wild bird. If you have a backyard chicken that dies or is very sick, most states have diagnostic labs. I’m from California. We have the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab, which is part of our veterinary school. In some states, it’s free, but for a nominal fee, you can get a whole necropsy or autopsy done of that bird with the goal of figuring out why that bird died to protect the rest of your flock.
The reason the state subsidizes it is that what happens if that backyard chicken had avian influenza or had virulent Newcastle disease? These are important investments so we can protect the rest of our commercial poultry industry, which is millions of birds, especially in your neck of the woods in the South. That’s a huge and very important investment because we need to protect our poultry industry. You can call your veterinarian. Your veterinarian will, at a minimum, be able to give you the contact information for a diagnostic lab where you can submit those birds and figure out what they died from, to protect the rest of your flock.
because detecting diseases like avian influenza helps safeguard millions of commercial poultry birds. Share on XIt’s amazing what they’ll do. For California, it’s about $25. They will do thousands of dollars of diagnostic work, with the goal of protecting our poultry industry. The benefit to the backyard enthusiast is that you can help the rest of your flock because sometimes, there are nutritional diseases, reproductive diseases, or every once in a while, we’re dealing with something like we’re dealing with now with avian influenza. There’s a lot of value in that. The state and the university will work with you to protect the rest of your flock. That’s on that side.
Let’s say you’re walking near a pond or something like that. You see a dead wild bird. Don’t touch the bird because we’re dealing with something that could potentially be what we call zoonotic. That would be my first recommendation. Second recommendation, I would encourage you to call your state wildlife agency or state department of agriculture. Sometimes, you’ll say, “I found a dead duck. It’s in this pond. Here is where some dead birds are.” They’ll go out and sample it. Sometimes, they’ll say, “We already know we have a lot of avian influenza in that area,” for example, or whatever disease that we’re dealing with.
They’ll encourage you, if you can, to put gloves on, put a surgical mask on, double-bag it, and put it in the trash. Those are the range of options. I 100% agree you should contact someone because it’s important to know and to help our agencies figure out where this virus is and where it’s not to track it. As we do disease modeling, when that information is ultimately submitted, it ends up on the USDA’s dashboard of wild bird surveillance. If it’s positive, it’ll end up on that board. I can use that to help guide our risk assessment for the poultry industry in various parts of the United States.
Along with that, say my barn cat brings home a dead bird. You’ve got to watch the cat if there are any symptoms, but I don’t think there’s anything you could do preventatively unless you have the bird tested.
That’s supportive care if your cat was exposed to the virus. You can have the bird tested to see what’s going on. Cats are a unique challenge because indoor or outdoor cats are at this interface of wildlife, and then they’re inside right next to our face in a way that most dogs, for example, aren’t. Backyard livestock and poultry, though, are in the same boat where we interact with them, but wildlife interacts with them.
They are a conduit for all kinds of diseases because wildlife will interact with them. We interact with our backyard domesticated animals. There are all kinds of diseases. Rabies is obviously one that we think about a little, not as much in the United States, but there are all kinds of diseases that we interface with when we interact with our backyard animals. Conceptually, we call this one health. We can’t be healthy unless our environment, our wildlife, and our domestic animals are healthy.
We don’t live in a bubble. We all intuitively know that. We are starting to train our vet students in this one health concept. It makes all the sense in the world. Your younger audience will be like, “That makes sense.” Older people may have been a little slower to that boat, but it makes a lot of sense. It’s great being at a vet school like Davis because we have a medical school, too.
We have these interesting workshops that are valuable for the vet students and the medical students that cross that one health divide, whether we’re dealing with rabies, avian influenza, COVID, etc. Ultimately, these diseases affect more than just humans. If we want to have humans who are healthy, we have to deal with the root cause, which is more of an ecosystem issue as opposed to solely a human issue.
I love the marriage of human medicine and veterinary medicine. I don’t know why it hasn’t existed longer than it has. There are so many comparative things. I love comparative pathology. It’s so fascinating.
That’s the fun part about vet med.
One other question we have from the audience. Do you feed chickens chicken feed?
Yes.
I know friends of mine give their fruits and vegetables.
That’s a very common question. Let’s start in the commercial world as a reference point. In the commercial world, feed is about 70% of your operating costs. They have to be efficient. The most expensive part of feed is protein. They want to use the right amount of protein. They don’t want to go over because they’re spending some extra money. They don’t want to go under because the birds aren’t going to grow at the rate that they need to grow at. In a general sense, from a backyard perspective, if you have laying hens, when they’re chicks, they get a chick starter feed. That has lots of protein in it because we want our birds to get big, not as much energy.
When they get eighteen weeks or so, just a couple of weeks before they start producing eggs, we want to switch them in a graded fashion from our chick feed to our layer feed. Our layer feed has high calcium for obvious reasons. The shell has a lot of calcium in it. It has less protein but more energy because now they need tons of energy to pop out an egg every 25 hours or so. If you think about a laying hen, a laying hen eats about 120 grams of feed a day. They need about 4.5 grams of calcium.
Chicken Nutrition And The 5% Rule
People are saying, “I’m going to give them fruits and veggies from our home.” If they pop that up too much, then that 120 grams of layer feed, they’re not going to eat all that. They’re not going to get all the calcium they need. That’s when we start having nutritional issues. I’m not a nutritionist, but what I always recommend is that I have a 5% rule. Some people look at their backyard chickens, and they want to give them chicken scratch. They want to give them fruits, veggies, and things like that.
I look at my dog, and I want to give them all kinds of treats because she’s very cute and all that. I don’t look at chickens and think that they’re super cute, but I get that that’s a sentiment because I’ve talked to enough backyarders. They want to give chicken scratch. They want to give fruits and veggies. I have this 5% rule. Don’t go above 5% of their total diet, whatever the amount is. Don’t go above 5% by weight of these goodies, chicken scratch, fruits, and veggies.
If we’re giving 100 grams just to make the math easy, don’t go above 5 grams of chicken scratch and these other things combined. They get the enrichment. You get the joy of giving them something that they enjoy, black soldier fly larvae or whatever. Don’t go above that 5% rule. We can take a good idea, giving these birds all these supplements, but not go above a level so they do not start having a lot of reproductive problems.
When I’m back in Ohio in the Cleveland area, it gets pretty cold in the winter. Do you have to up their energy requirements for food?
That’s also a very common question. The answer is no. Birds are hardy because they’re in a flock. They can huddle together.
You don’t put a heater in there or anything.
That’s a good question that you’re asking, because every year, there are always some fires from people who plug in a space heater and forget about it. We’re anthropomorphizing in the sense that we think that they’re going to get cold. The commercial folks don’t like cold because the birds now have to use more and more feed to keep their internal body temperature at a certain temperature.
It’s because it’s all about production.
I would say that, especially in the wintertime, you want your coop to always be dry. If there are big gusts of wind, birds don’t typically like wind very much. You want to make sure that you’ve constructed your coop in such a way that you have good ventilation in the coop. That ventilation, that crosswind, is going above the level of their heads. If you have whatever structure that you’ve devised, if you’ve got 3, 4, or 5 birds and they’re shielded from wind, cold, and wetness, they’ll be warm even in those Ohio winters. You don’t need space heaters. They’ll just eat a little more, and they won’t make as many eggs.
What’s a common disease that they’ll get that doesn’t kill them, or isn’t there one?
To your point, there’s a disease called coccidiosis, which is a protozoan parasite. We don’t get it. It’s not something that affects us. As young chicks, sometimes, you’ll see some bloody diarrhea. That’s typically this coccidiosis or cocci infection. Unless it’s a bad type of coccidia or a bad infection with coccidia, they typically recover. It just takes them a little longer to get to where they need to go, as far as weight and things like that.
You don’t have to medicate them?
We didn’t talk about this. Probably, the number one thing you can do, and this is also a pretty ubiquitous disease, just like Marek’s disease, is that you can protect your birds from this easily by using what’s called a medicated starter feed. When you’re feeding your chicks, there are two different choices. You can feed them an organic starter feed, which is high in protein and low in calcium compared to the layer feed, or you can feed them a medicated starter feed, which is what I always recommend. That has what we call a coccidiostat. All it does is it keeps that coccidia population down a little because it’s got a chemical in there.
Is it Albon?
There are different types of them. I can’t remember all of them, in all honesty, off the top of my head. What they do is reduce the amount of coccidia to a normal level, so your birds aren’t going to have diarrhea. They’re not going to be poor doers and things like that. It’s very commonly used. If we were talking about antibiotics, I would say don’t use antibiotics unless you need to because we’re dealing with this antimicrobial resistance thing.
This is not the same class of bacteria. This is a protozoan, which we don’t deal with as humans. It helps from a welfare perspective, a production perspective, and the general bird happiness perspective. Your birds will be much healthier. Some people are very adamant. They want everything organic, which I understand. If that’s the case, the way you would control for that is by having good husbandry.
We talked about not allowing rain into your coop, for example, and not having water splashing from your waters, because when the birds shed in their poop, those protozoa, if you have a moist or wet environment, will help those eggs persist. The next birds will eat them. You’re going to have this cyclical outbreak, which can be a real problem at some point. At the minimum, do that. At the maximum, a good majority of backyard birds use the coccidiostat, which is in the starter feed. Between those two things, you should be good.
That sounds like the best idea. One other thing. Where do you get the chicks from? You mentioned hatchery. You don’t get them in the mail. When you want to get bees, you can get bees through the mail.
No, you can get the chicks through the mail, too. They do have mail-order hatcheries.
You can?
Yes, it’s a thing. In Ohio, in the winter, you can’t do that because the shipping can cause problems, as you can imagine, in the cold. They’re seasonal, depending on where you live. The US Postal Service will work with you on that. Your hatchery will work with you. The nice part about working with large hatcheries is that most of those large hatcheries are part of what we call the National Poultry Improvement Plan, or NPIP.
The nice part about NPIP is that they are overseen by a combination of the state and the poultry industry, with the goal of making sure that they’re not carrying diseases like Salmonella, for example, or avian influenza when you order them. I always recommend that when you’re getting chicks, call your feed store and say, “Are you buying chicks from NPIP-approved hatcheries?” They’ll probably be like, “I don’t know.”
Working with large hatcheries is beneficial because most are part of the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP). Overseen by state and industry partners, NPIP helps ensure birds are screened for diseases like Salmonella and avian influenza before… Share on XYou’ll be like, “Can you find out and get back to me? I want to buy chicks that are healthy.” You’re setting yourself up for the healthiest possible flock. If you’re dealing with hatcheries that are part of that program, you might be on Craigslist or something like that, and you might want a very specific breed that maybe the hatcheries don’t have. Many of those places will be part of NPIP, too, because if they want to ship their birds across state lines, there are two ways to do that. One, the easier way and the least expensive way is to be part of the NPIP program.
You, as the consumer, know these people are legit. People are walking through their facilities. They’re doing some tests for various pathogens. We’ve got a good partner here as opposed to someone else who might not know what NPIP is or doesn’t use NPIP. In that situation, you’re like, “I hope my birds are disease-free.” Nothing’s perfect, even the NPIP ones, but at least this increases the probability that you’re dealing with healthy birds.
There is so much to this. My producers who have been tuning in to this this whole time, you guys, Joanne and Duke, this is incredible, isn’t it? In Ohio, we have a lot of farms. There are “chickens out back” but I guarantee you, I’m sure no one has an eighth of that knowledge of what we were talking about.
I have a question. We had chickens. I would clean the eggs before eating them, but our neighbor had more chickens than we did. They would clean them with special cloths. Is that an issue? I heard that they’re not supposed to get wet.
Egg Washing And Finding Reliable Information
You’ll see a lot of YouTube videos where people will dunk their eggs in water. You don’t want to do that because the eggshell is porous. You can push the bacteria into the egg. That’s when you start having problems because that’s the part that we consume. If it gets into the yolk, that’s this very rich media. That’s what we grow bacteria on in the lab.
If you have Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, if it gets into that yolk and then you don’t refrigerate the egg, because a lot of people leave them out for whatever reason, like cultural, then you can deal with an issue. CDC estimates that one out of every 10,000 eggs has Salmonella enteritidis or one of the Salmonella that make us sick.
Commercially, in the US, the law is that you have to wash your eggs. The commercial poultry industry has sprayers. They can do it in such a way that we’re not driving bacteria in there. The United States, Japan, and Australia wash their eggs as a rule. The rest of the world does not wash their eggs. Those of you who have traveled around the world see eggs that are unwashed. You see eggs that are at room temperature. It makes you scratch your head.
There are all kinds of reasons for that, including that eggs have what’s called a bloom or a cuticle on them. That’s almost like a biofilm that has some antibacterial properties in it. Some people, including some countries, will say, “We’re trusting that biological membrane. If we wash the eggs, we’re wiping off that membrane.” Some people will say, “Let’s keep the membrane on there. Let’s sell the eggs.” There’s science behind that. The problem is that, sometimes, people take that to an illogical conclusion.
They have their backyard egg. It’s got poop on it. They’re like, “There’s a cuticle on it or the bloom. It’ll be fine.” That’s not true in that scenario. For backyard poultry owners, I recommend not washing your eggs because there’s too much potential to drive bacteria in there. You should collect the eggs every day and put them in the fridge. You shouldn’t have that much feces ever on your eggs.
In a general sense, if you have more than 5% of your eggs that have feces on them, you’re doing something wrong on the husbandry side. I always joke with people. There are three things we don’t talk about in polite company. They are religion, politics, and whether you should wash your eggs or not, because people get passionate about it. You’re going to get all kinds of comments from people saying, “I don’t care what Maurice says.”
Raw diet, put that on the list, too.
You could add that. My general sense is keep things simple. If you have good husbandry and collect your eggs every day, you shouldn’t have any feces on them. If you do have feces on them, especially if you have someone immunocompromised or you’re giving your eggs to your neighbors, get rid of them. If it’s dry, you can take a piece of sandpaper and rub it off. Take a washcloth with some hot water and wipe it off.
Sometimes, you’ll see people who want to wash eggs in all kinds of weird ways. We’re getting way too complicated. If you do your husbandry right, there’s still going to be bacteria on them, and we know where the egg comes from, but it’s pretty harmless, especially if you stick it in the fridge. I recommend that backyarders not wash their eggs.
Before we go, one more thing. For people who want information, what is a good website? Is it the CDC, or is there a group of poultry veterinarians they can check out?
I’m at a university. If you type in UC Davis and poultry, you’ll get to our Cooperative Extension Poultry website. We have a YouTube channel. My general recommendation for folks is when you’re looking for resources, go to university and government websites. The reason I say that is because I’m not getting paid by company X, Y, or Z to sell you apple cider vinegar to cure your chicken from avian influenza.
When you go on some of these websites, and someone’s telling you, “Buy this chicken. Buy this magic elixir. Buy this snake oil.” The reality is that they obviously have a financial motivation. If I have a financial motivation, I have to disclose it. What I’m keen on is making sure that I’m delivering science-based information. People can always reach out to me. I get emails all the time. I like helping people.
Unfortunately, sometimes, the answer is, “We don’t know.” We know what doesn’t work. Sometimes, we know what does work, but as humans, we always want some magical solution. I get a lot of people who are suggesting all kinds of things, which science doesn’t suggest, but some of them are there to make a buck. Some of them also want to believe something that science doesn’t suggest yet. That’s why I would always lean on the government/academic sites. We’re wrong all the time, but at least if we’re wrong or right, it’s based on what we know.
What kills me is that if I look at something on Facebook where this person with a four-month-old Great Dane had Parvo. I don’t even know why I read the comments, it angers me so much. This is why we’re doing the show. The dangerous misinformation is what scares the heck out of me. This has been great.
I’m looking forward to tuning in to this webinar when I’m walking the beach because you learn better by repetition. I’ve learned so much. Joanne and Duke, I think you would agree with me. Thank you so much, Dr. Pitesky. I know we went a little long, but it was so fascinating. There was so much stuff. I got all the answers to all my questions.
Thanks for reaching out. Thanks for having me.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us as usual. My co-host, Janet Novotny King, will be back, but for now, it’s Dr. Alice Novotny Jeromin saying thanks for tuning in. Kiss your pets for us. Tune in next episode.
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About Dr. Maurice Pitesky
Maurice Pitesky DVM, ACVPM
Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension
Poultry Health and Food Safety Epidemiology
Maurice Pitesky is an associate professor of cooperative extension at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine with an appointment in poultry health and food safety epidemiology. Dr. Pitesky earned his BS in biology from UCLA, and his DVM and MPVM from UC Davis. Pitesky is also boarded in Preventative Veterinary Medicine (DACVPM).
Pitesky’s academic research interests are focused in major areas:
- Using various epidemiological techniques and cartography to understand how avian diseases move in time and space.
- Using remote sensing such as weather radar, telemetry and satellite imagery for waterfowl predictive modeling around the world
- Disease modeling of avian diseases
- Using web-scraping and computational linguistics to understand the role of social media in sentiment associated with animal diseases
- Gaining a better understanding of small-scale poultry production with respect to environmental sustainability, poultry heath, and food safety.