How Do Chickens Keep Themselves Clean?
To us, chicken hygiene, or animal hygiene in general, is a far cry from what we would consider "being clean." However, in terms of chicken, how do they clean themselves?
Chickens are kind of limited when it comes to appendages. The only two limbs that are useful for a chicken are its beak and feet, and the wings on modern chickens are pretty much useless, except for insulation, and in our case, BBQ's and so on....
A chicken uses its beak for a variety of activities: eating, pecking, fighting, scratching, poking, and cleaning. Chickens use their beaks to clean and straighten individual feathers, as well as to coat their feathers with a self-produced water repellant (produced from a gland on the back of the tail). They are flexible enough to reach any spot on their body with their beak, and if you've ever seen how small a chicken's beak is compared to the size of their body, I'd say they have their work cut out for them! It's almost a sure bet that when a chicken isn't (a) eating/drinking, or (b) getting into trouble, they are cleaning (called "preening") themselves.
A second way that chickens maintain themselves is by dust bathing. This seems counterintuitive because dust bathing is literally a dirt bath! However, the function of dust bathing is to remove or mitigate external parasites such as lice or mites. As a matter of fact, dust bathing is very instinctual in chickens; chicks as young as a week old will start dust bathing!
After a chicken takes a dust bath, they typically shake a bunch of the dirt out of their feathers, which creates a pretty good sized dust cloud. Afterwards, the function(s) of the beak play a role in removing dirt, dead skin, broken feathers, as well as straightening feathers and reapplying the water repelling coating.
Here's what dustbathing looks life in real-life!
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