(2 September 2014, 22:15)Scythe13 Wrote: If you have chickens, you have rats. If you have rats, you should have snares. You end up with dead rats and maggots. That'll be a part of the food sorted. That aside, you'd need to have lots of corn! Soya is a massive staple of current chicken feed.
Chickens are woodland animals and naturally they scratch around for grubs, insects, green shoots and seed as their natural diet. Corn or any other chicken feed is not a requirement of keeping chickens and is only really used to enable chickens to be farmed more intensively or in a smaller area. We tended not to give them any additional feed other than the occasional handful of corn to encourage them in for the night, far better for them to scratch around and find their own food.
Keeping chickens definitely increasing the likelihood of rats, as they will be drawn in by any food that is put out for them and also by fecal matter which rats also eat. But you can greatly reduce the risk of rats through moving the chickens around, rather than keeping them in one place; keeping them in open areas, rather than alongside hedges or embankments and by having chicken houses than do not provide nesting areas beneath them!
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