And don’t throw the treats! Sprinkle them around your feet so that your hens have to come near you to eat the treats. Start off by teaching your chickens that seeing you means treats. All it requires is some high-value treats and patience. You can actually train your chickens to be friendly! While friendliness training is often best started at a very young age, you can still teach older hens to become friendly too. My flock loves the sound of a shaking treat bag! If the first marker cue isn’t enough, the rattling of the bag is usually enough motivation for the stragglers to hustle on over so that they don’t miss the treats. When I shake them, the contents rattle around and make noise. I find that re-using old chicken treat bags work best. Make sure the action is loud enough that your hens can hear you even when they are far away. You can also use a verbal phrase to call your chickens as well. Training chickens to come when called requires two things: a marker action or word, and treats! The marker action that I use is running to the coop while clapping my hands. The younger birds take their cue from the older flock and learn very quickly! It helps that my older flock is already trained. I free-range my flock on the homestead, so whenever I want to put them in their enclosure, I just call for them and they come running!Įvery spring and summer I have to teach this trick to the new pullets and cockerels I raise. Food motivation will make training go a lot faster too!Īfter the obstacle course, training my chickens to come when called is probably my second favorite chicken trick to teach. Friendly hens are always easiest to train and confident, out-going hens are less likely to be scared of the obstacle course elements. When choosing a chicken to train for the obstacle course, I recommend choosing your friendliest, most outgoing hen who is also food motivated. tunnel- a tunnel may be a little harder to make at home, but I just used an old play set tunnel that I used to play in when I was younger.weave poles- you can use dowels, stakes, or sticks stuck into the ground, cones would work too!.A-frame- I made an A-frame using two boards that peaked at the top and were supported by a block.dog walk (or chicken walk in this case)- to make this element, all you need is a balance beam type set up with a ramp on either end for going up and down.a jump- a jump can be just about anything: hoola-hoop, wooden dowels, branches.teeter totter- this obstacle is pretty easy to make at home, I just used a long board placed over a block.She would do the whole course and then get rewarded with sunflower seeds at the end! Here are some common obstacles that you can teach chickens to do: I taught one of my hens to go through a tunnel, over a jump, over a teeter totter, and up and down an A-frame. Well, you can teach your chickens to do that too! If you’ve been into chicken keeping for any length of time, I’m sure you have seen those YouTube videos of a chicken doing an obstacle course. One of the very first things I trained one of my chickens to do was an obstacle course.
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