Should I give treats to my baby chicks

What should I feed my baby chicken - and can I give them treats?  are questions I have come across often enough I decided to post it:

Investigating "green" stuff

Leaving aside the issue of organic-no GMO  and non-organic feeds = genetically modified foods, you can't go wrong with chick starter. So get a bag of it to start with. When using chick starter only, you don't need grit. If you feed other things, you will need grit too- small stones that chickens need to grind up the food in the gizzard.

This is all assuming you got chicks in the mail or have hatched them yourself.
The answer to - Should I give my chicks treats? or Should I give my chicks anything other than chick starter? - depends on your philosophy: If you consider a mother hen - weather permitting, she'd take out her chicks on day 1 - foraging and offering all kinds of found foods. I tried to imitate that the best I could.

Mother nature does know what it is doing when it comes to feeding chicks, so my answer is - yes, give variety - taste and texture, starting after the stress of getting there (chicks in the mail) is subsided. Consider however that if you allowed them to be raised on fully foraged food - they'd be getting 50% vegetarian, the rest bugs, worms and such. So if your treats are low protein and you give too many ...you'll skew the  total nutrition too much.

So keep the treats few enough not to be too low on the protein.

Why would you want to give "treats" 

One of the reasons you might want to give treats  is to get the chicks used to you and your hand. Gently and often handled chicks will be more trusting and friendly with you later.
Another reason to give "interesting" foods is:  decrease boredom - one of the 2 main  reasons for stress pecking, next to not enough space.
Get them used to a variety of food taste and texture, including those you might want to feed in case they ever got sick. If they are sick, they will be less likely to try out new foods, so if they already learned to love watery zuccini and kefir ...you got a way to give them liquids too.

I used a plant dish and put some of their chick starter on it as well as a clump of earth with grass on it. ...plus some of the veggies & the bugs. Chicks love to scratch and find things to peck.

What can you give as treats? - I went slow - At first, you can start with some cooked vegetable as treats - like a little broccoli, chard, zuccini. Interestingly, my chicks only went for the green stuff, never wanted carrots. After a couple of weeks, since there were so many bugs in the roses - I dumped them into a cup and gave it to them in their forage dish ....they had no trouble with those. High protein treats would be a crushed up hard-boiled egg, tiny bits of cooked meat off bones, if you do eat meat. If you got some small larvae in kitchen compost, those will work. Mine loved - and still do love scrambled eggs. I did also give them strawberries since they were in season - be careful with too much sugary liquid though ..diarrhea possible.

I also took some crumbles and mixed it with home-made kefir (live cultures) - they loved that too.

And then, at 3 weeks - they had their first "outing" - can't keep them from scratching and pecking then ....they loved it.

So - main nutrition, unless you have a foraging mother hen - is chick starter - enjoy the rest - and keep it interesting for them - it's fun for both of you. Remember - chicks need to scratch and peck - it is inborn - a boring small space with nothing to do will lead to pecking each other.