Saturday, March 17, 2007

A chicken experiment


We had some half-eaten pieces of ice cream from G.'s birthday party to throw out and Fino suggested we feed it to the chickens. It didn't take much to convince me to go outside in the snow storm with him to "record" the experiment. There were 9 girls running around the house playing games that required a lot of imagination and even more jewerly, shoes and accessories not to mention the "excited chatter" (a.k.a. screaming) that was going on. 

So Fino and I braved the driving snow with the heaping plate of ice cream cake to the chicken coop to test our hypothesis that chickens will eat anything.


The experiment results were clear in about 3 seconds ...


They like it and they don't care what the temperature outside is when they eat it (about 20 degrees with driving wind and wet snow).

One variable we didn't take into account was the flying mess. It seems chickens feel the need to vigirously shake their heads from side-to-side to remove the ice cream stuck to their beaks. Yeah, being in the middle of a chicken ice cream feeding frenzy with all the splatter wasn't so great.  But in the name of science, I guess it was worth an additional load of laundry.


Do chickens eat ice cream cake?


And if you're looking for more action, check out our YouTube playlist of chicken videos from the past year, including our first chicken feeding frenzy that involved one of the girls' gingerbread houses.

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