My Pet Chicken Blog

Owning a chicken first aid kit for your flock is a must! Let’s face it, no matter what level chicken keeper you are, there will eventually come a day that an illness or accident happens and you will need medical supplies for a member of your flock. As luck will have it, these events notoriously […]

If you’re growing a garden, consider adding herbs for chickens. Their benefits are two-fold, because they’re good for your birds and you! Herbs are notoriously easy to grow and maintain. They’re not picky and can be grown in almost any soil and will adapt to almost any situation (except being waterlogged). You can even add […]

As a My Pet Chicken Customer Service Rep, I receive health-related questions from y’all almost daily. A common question is about what appears to be a pasty butt in older chickens. In my experience, this is usually a case of “vent gleet,” so I wanted to share what I know about it with you. A […]

Chicken Activist Sally Bird—or as she is affectionately known, “One-Eyed Sal”—is a Barred Plymouth Rock and an activist for change within chicken-kind, an outspoken critic of the pecking order as it now stands, and an influential member of her flock.  She granted us an exclusive interview from her coop and run on a lovely spring […]

If you keep chickens and haven’t yet heard about the FDA’s recent rules and standards changes please take a moment to read them. In this post, we’ll provide some small flock guidelines and reminders to help you understand what this means for your pet chickens. New rules set in place for increased food safety and security have changed the […]

Recently we’ve been asked about a pretty sensational story: whether the deaths of some chickens purportedly caused by necrotic enteritis (NE) were due to using feed or chicken feed supplements mixed at home. We think there must be some confusion somewhere in the chain of information, a misunderstanding that should be cleared up. Let’s get this out of […]

How do you keep clean water in the coop? Having clean water in the coop at all times is important for keeping healthy chickens, but achieving this can be a challenge.   I don’t know about you, but for me, litter and poop in the water is the main problem I encounter.  It seems that no […]

One of the weird things about owning chickens is that you have to pay a lot of attention to chicken poop. It’s strange, but it’s an important indicator of health or illness, just as it is in humans. Healthy chicken poop is generally greenish or brownish, depending on diet, and (when fresh), about the consistency […]

Crossed Beak / Scissor Beak, can be severe, but many times, this beak malformation is not hazardous to your chicken’s health.   This condition can afflict any breed, but seems to be more prevalent in Easter Eggers or Ameraucanas. My only experience with cross beak / scissor beak occurred with one of my Blue Wheaten Ameraucana pullets that I had so […]

If you have chickens long enough and especially if you incubate fertilized hatching eggs yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll have a chicken with curled or crooked toes. Curled toes is when a chick or chicken walks on the tops of this curled toes and crooked toes is when they walk on the sides of […]