Roberta,
I wouldn't do it, but that's just me. I've had too many experiences w/my eggs tasting like the food I've fed my chickens. Do you have a local animal shelter you could donate it to?

-Sheila

If you use it as a treat and not a feed the eggs should be just fine, or you could probably still feed it to the dog if it is only a portion of the meal? Why cant the dog utilize the feed?

She started having seizures --- don't know for sure if it was the dog food, but when we stopped it, the seizures stopped.... several months later, she ate some when my daughter was here with her dogs and that very day, had another seizure. It is strange because this was her dog food for 15 years (along with healthy table scraps).

Anyway, I started making dog food for her with chicken/broth/rice/oatmeal/carrots and kelp meal. She had lost 1/3rd of her body weight on just the dog food and now is back in great shape. We won't allow her to have any more Purina Dog Chow.

Back to the chickens ----- why is cat food OK and not dog food?

Dog food has less protein than cat food. I think it would be fine to feed your chickens as a supplement to your regular layer feed. I've had free range chickens for many years in the same lot as our cattle. They will eat everything and especially like it when we are feeding grain to our show calves. If chickens can eat that with no problem then I wouldn't worry about feeding them dog food.

Chickens will eat anything and I cannot imagine that dog food would harm them in any way...and it's not like you have 25 bags...I'd just use it as a supplement like someone else suggested...When faced with the delima as yours, I used to give the treat to my chickens like you would scratch..and I just toss it around in the yard and let them find it..

The old cure for chickens pecking on each other is a can of dog food.

It won't hurt them if chickens are anything like ducks. My ducks love to eat dogfood and catfood, and since they love it I give them some each day when I feed them their own food. They even eat with the cats sometimes!

Roberta, I can't answer about the chickens but had a comment about the Purina dog food. My dog is getting old but has always been sorta fussy about his food. I should say that his digestive system is fussy, he sure isn't about what he eats. A few years back, we picked up the same bag of Purina that we always got and was surprised when the kibbles were smaller and darker than usual. We fed him and he had some really bad diarrhea. I contacted Purina online and they told me that they had changed the formulations of several of their products. I ended up with coupons for free dog food and they went back to their original formula eventually. I mention this because maybe they have changed the formula of your particular type of food. There was nothing on the bag we bought to tell that it was different from what we normally got. Just a thought. Lori

Dog food is often corn based, whereas cat food is often meat-based. They each might have different supplemental vitamins.

I've read that one thing to try for cannibalistic chickens is to give them cat food, as it gives them the protein they need. Dog food doesn't work for that.

--Jonathan

If u moisten it a bit---the birds love it-or the big birds-crows- can eat it the way it is--and will