Backyard Poultry Forum

If using rat bat will it affect poultry, will they eat the droppings from rats & mice?

If you use the blocks, it would be safer. Make sure its out of reach from your birds. My experience is poultry won't eat rat droppings, their beaks are very well co-ordinated with their eyes, and used for precision. They can decipher between droppings and all the different types of grains.

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MONEY can't buy happiness....but it can buy CHOOKS, and that's pretty much the same thing

In my experience chickens are not all that sensitive to consuming rat bait. I think I read somewhere that birds don't absorb lethal doses in the same way as mammals do (but don't quote me on it).

More of an issue is that the modern forms of bait accumulate in the system (Difenacoum etc.) and may be released into the eggs or remain in the flesh of the fowls if eaten by humans. However, even these amounts are probably too low to be of any real concern.

The safest bait around pets and humans is the old Warfarin type. However, this is also the least effective in actually killing rats and mice.

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"Somewhere over the mountain..." (or was that "rainbow"?)

Use the blue coloured baits, even in my aviaries the birds don't touch it , if somehow the mice drag some out of the bait a
Stations. I use one thats a square blue block with a hole in the middle, can't remember the name .

I use the blue ones for the same reason - chooks just aren't attracted to blue

Some years ago I lost a chicken nibbling at a dead rat. (The rat had been part eaten by a bird of prey.)
She had chicks at the time.
I have not used poison ever since.

Chickens will not eat droppings or rat poison, but they eat dead mice and rats.

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Small free-range flock of Croad Langshans
http://croadlangshan.org/