Baby chicken poopy feet

I was mistaken when I thought to save money on shavings by using newspaper for baby chick bedding.  And I promise it wasn’t a problem when I only had to change papers once a day.  But as baby chicks grow, so do the poopy spots, so I changed to pine shavings.  But not before I had to remove the cemented on poop galoshes that walking in poop created on the bottoms of the baby chicks feet!

Chicklets snuggling in my coat and learning to be tame.

I should have taken a picture of what it looked like (poop snow-shoes, galoshes, chicks-turned-ducks with poop webs).  It had dried rock hard under that heat lamp and you couldn’t have gotten it off without taking skin along with it.  So I put them, all six, in a cardboard box to the downstairs bathroom and proceeded to soak it loose.

I first thought to soak it off with soapy water, but that didn’t go too good.  It was too dried, thick, and hard, so I ran enough really warm water in the bottom of the bathtub and let them walk around in it for 15 minutes or so.  I’d check each chick and pull off whatever came off easily and put them back to stand in the water for another few minutes.

I had to do all of this on my knees, and they were sore by the time I got finished with all of it. But when I was finished I had baby chicks with clean feet and wet belly feathers.  I put wads of toilet paper into the bottom of the box, layered that with wet chicks, and topped it off with more wads of toilet paper and closed the box.  They were grateful as heck too.

I took them back upstairs to dry under their very own heat lamp and 15 minutes later they were good as new.  Just thought someone might be interested in what it takes to do it.