9 Healthy Treats Your Chickens Will Love - The Happy Chicken Coop (2024)

We all love to spoil our chickens with chicken treats now and then.

Giving treats to your chickens helps to give their diet some variation. It also helps to keep them happy and laying eggs.

If you’re not careful, buying chicken treats for your chickens can cost lots of money. That’s why most of our treats are normally kitchen scraps and leftovers… In fact, 75% of the cost of keeping chickens is made up of chicken feed.

With that being said, I still love to spoil our chickens, and they get more than their fair share of treats! Be it strawberries, celery scraps, and many more treats.

Let’s take a look at our girls’ top 9 favorite healthy treats.

If you’re looking for even more treats, you can use this handy chicken treat chart.

Our Choice of Chicken Treats

Oatmeal Chicken Treat

Oatmeal is one of our girls’ favorite treats, and it’s probably their favorite treat during the cold winter months.

Picture the scene: it’s 6:30 am pitch-black and thick frost on the ground.

I let our girls out of their coop, and straight away, they can smell the oatmeal. I pour the oatmeal straight out into their trough- I’ve found in the past they can bully each other if I just put the pan down because they can’t all get to it at once.

You can also add either maple syrup or bananas to the oatmeal to help give it some variety.

Cottage Cheese Chicken Treat

There’s something about cottage cheese that our chickens love. Maybe it’s the cheese taste, or maybe it’s just the consistency?

Either way, they love it!

You can give this chicken treat straight out of the tub, or you can mix it with vegetables. Both carrots and broccoli go really well with it.

It provides your chickens with several essential nutrients such as calcium which helps keep their bones strong. It’s also a great source of protein, as laying chickens need around 20 grams of protein a day to produce an egg.

Pasta and Noodles Can Be A Chicken Treat

Have you ever seen free-range chickens running around the garden with streams of pasta flowing out of their beak!?

Cooked pasta can be a cheap but filling treat for your chickens. Two cups of pasta are more than enough for a flock of six chickens.

Again, like with cottage cheese, you can mix other food into the pasta. A nice creamy sauce or chopped-up vegetables can go a long way to keeping your chickens happy.

However, they will be pleased with just dry pasta.

If you are going to feed your chicken pasta, make sure to cook it beforehand! I’m not sure they would appreciate hard, crunchy, raw pasta…

Their Favorite Chicken Treats Are Mealworms

Mealworms are, without a doubt, our chickens’ favorite treat of all time.

They are a speedy and easy chicken treat and require no preparation.

I buy a 1lb bag of them and dump them into a pile inside our girls’ pen. It’s very entertaining to watch the chickens run back and forth with the mealworms in their mouth.

You can normally buy them from your local fishing/tackle store, but they can be quite expensive- $20USD for 1lb. If you give your chickens mealworms regularly, it might be worth considering farming your own mealworms.

Corn Is A Chicken Treats

You can either feed sweetcorn to them loose, mix it in with their pellets, or you can feed it to them straight from the cob.

Here’s a great idea if you want to keep your girls busy. You can buy several cobs of corn and hang the cobs using some string. You can then let the girls peck away at them- this should keep them amused for several hours.

Not only is sweetcorn a cheap treat, but it’s also packed with lutein and zeaxanthin, which are phytochemicals that help keep your chickens vision healthy. It will also provide your girls with some much-needed fiber.

Ginger

We’ve already written about the superfood ginger, and some of the health benefits your chickens will experience when eating ginger. Certain studies claim that feeding chickens ginger can increase the size of the eggs and improve the number of antioxidants in the egg yolk.

I tend to use ginger chicken treats when they molt tohelp them grow back their feathers quicker.

If you feed your chickens ginger, you can mix the ginger powder with their pellets or mix it with their water.

However, make sure you only give your chickens ginger no more than once per month. Feeding your chickens too much ginger can cause muscle swelling and occasionally death.

Watermelon Is A Summertime Chicken Treats

Watermelon is the perfect summer snack for chickens.

Not only is it full of water and extremely refreshing for them, but it also contains lots of essential vitamins and minerals.

I buy watermelon cheap when it’s in season and slice them up into small chunks. I then take the small chunks and freeze them.

I get the frozen chunks out during a hot summer’s day and place them into the chickens’ water bowl. This helps keep the water cool, and the chickens can also peck at the watermelon.

You could also mix the frozen watermelon in with plain greek yogurt. This helps spread the watermelon out, and greek yogurt is also very refreshing for them.

Pumpkin

Pumpkins are another one of those refreshing treats with added health benefits.

The seeds inside pumpkins help with worming. According to Delaware State University, pumpkin seeds “contain a deworming compound called cucurbitacin which has been used to expel tapeworms.”

Pumpkin can be tough to cut, so I just put the pumpkin inside our chicken pen and then hit it with a mallet to break it open for the girls.

They will entertain your girls for hours as they merrily peck away. You will notice they will eat the pumpkin in its entirety- bar the skin.

Another benefit I found was that their egg yolks turned vibrant orange for a few days after they’d eaten the pumpkin.

Meat (Because Chickens Love it For Dinner)

When you have leftover meat, trimmings, or even leftovers from a hunting harvest, your chickens will be grateful for the extra handouts. You see, chickens are omnivores, and they love to eat meat.

Have you ever noticed your chickens attacking cat food, for example? Or chasing mice and frogs?

Well, this is because both examples are full of protein, and most cat foods are targeted at carnivores, like kitties. But low-and-behold chickens love to get in on the meaty action as well.

If it bothers you to feed your chickens chicken or poultry meat, you can stick to other types of proteins, like red meat.

Scrambled Egg As Chicken Treats

Sometimes during the peak of summer, our girls can get carried away and lay too many eggs for us to cope with!

I could store the eggs or freeze them to use later, but instead, I prefer to cook several of them and make scrambled eggs for the girls.

A scrambled egg is full of protein and can quickly fill your girl’s up.

Scrambled eggs are a superfood for chickens. Since their eggs are full of protein, they are perfect for giving your chickens a boost when their immune systems fail them.

If I have a sick or injured chicken who is stressed, I always try to include some extra protein, often in the form of scrambled eggs, for the distressed hen.

Bonus: Don’t throw away the shells! Bake them for a few minutes at 350 degrees and then crush them up. They pack an extra punch of calcium!

Note: Always make sure you cook any eggs which you feed your chickens. You DON’T want your chickens getting a taste for raw eggs because they will start eating their own eggs.

One important point to make here is that you shouldn’t give your chickens too many treats, as this can actually cause your chickens to stop laying eggs.

Just makesure that their treats are part of a consistent and varied diet,and your chickens will be fine.

Our Choice of Chicken Treats

Let us know which treats your chickens love to snack on in the comments below!

READ NEXT: Should You Be Feeding Your Chickens This Superfood?

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