Giving Chickens a Bath

This is one of those things that I never thought I would do. Three years ago if someone had said, "Hey, Cristy, how about giving these chickens a bath!" I would have laughed. You don't give chickens a bath!! Or do you? Well, you do when you are getting ready for a show, apparently. The white chickens my daughter is raising for the 4H market auction are going to the fair today and they need to be clean.

We went out to the field pen with our scale and picked out 8 chickens of similar size to wash. For the fair, they have to be very close in weight so we will choose the three best ones before we leave. It is best to have a variety to choose from.

How to bathe chickens

You need: Dish soap, vinegar, a toothbrush:



A big pile of towels and three tubs of water: one with bath-warm water and a bit of dish soap, the second with cooler water, the third with coolish water and a little vinegar.



It is best to have two people--one to hold the chicken and one to do the scrubbing. Guess who got to do the scrubbing. Hint: it wasn't my daughter (although to be fair, she did wash the other 4 chickens earlier in the day with no help).

Put a chicken into the warm water and get wet. The chicken, that is, but you will probably get pretty wet as well. Scrub him up. For the broiler chickens, since they spend a lot of time laying on their bellies, the toothbrush is handy for scrubbing off the caked on poopies.




Put the chicken in the first rinse bath:




Then the second (and hope he doesn't poo in the water):



Wrap the chicken in a towel to dry him a bit. We try not to get the head too wet--I just scrubbed it a bit with the toothbrush. They hate the entire process, by the way.




Next we put the chickens into a pen with clean straw and a heat lamp. They look pretty bedraggled and sad at first:




But after about 45 minutes, they look all pretty and fluffy:



The countdown begins: 4 1/2 hours until we take 7 chickens and one bunny to the fair.