Honey, I Shrunk the Chickens

My family would joke that every pet we brought home would act the opposite of how they were supposed to – cats living with chickens, pigs being anything but herd animals, and Mini Horses living in complete, peaceful unison with horses more than three times their size.

A couple of months ago, we got some baby chickens from the feed store, something we had done many times before. We got them home, emptied them into the brooder, put the heat lamp on, and made sure water and food bowls were full. We went on our merry way; as I said before, we had raised chickens from chicks multiple times in my life, so we knew the drill.

Time went on, and things were going well - the chicks were happy, healthy, and as active as could be. Since we were experiencing a really warm Spring, and they were fully feathered, we transitioned them to our outdoor coop. They were locked up at night in the enclosed portion of our coop and enjoyed their free time in the penned-in outdoor area to run, scratch around, and take dust baths.

Time went on. Days passed. And I started to notice something… why aren’t these chickens growing?

I figured that it had been a minute since we had baby chickens, and maybe chickens grew slower than the ducks did that I had raised not that long ago.

Two weeks went by, and my sister and mom both noticed what I had. These chicks aren’t growing. They were three and ½ months old and were not nearly as big as they should be. Our first thought was that the feed store we bought them from had sold us Bantam Chickens, a much smaller counterpart of any sort of fowl. But how realistic is that, out of the three breeds we bought, they’d all be mislabeled as Bantams?

We scoured the internet, from their diet to the bedding we had in their brooder.

And then I found it. It wasn’t what was IN the brooder, but what was OVER the brooder.

I mentioned earlier in the story that a couple of months earlier I had raised several ducks, all different breeds. We used our leftover supplies (except the food, as ducks need special waterfowl food) for the chickens. The water and food bowls, the bedding, the brooder box, and the heat lamp.

After researching a ton, I read that if you use a heat lamp instead of a red light, you can actually stunt your chicks growth and lo’ and behold MINI CHICKENS! Ya’ll when I tell you that I have never seen a thing like this in my life and I have had chickens almost my whole life.

They are perfectly healthy and happy chickens…..just smaller.

Upon further research later on, it’s not one hundred percent that the light is what stunted the chickens’ growth because you can get one thousand answers on the internet, but it is a funny " Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” story to tell!