Animals

In large farms they often add pieces of ground up bone and meat to cows' feed. In addition to sometimes causing mad cow disease, this is absolutely unnatural since cows are herbivores, and although it might provide vitamins, it disturbs the cows both physically and emotionally.

But chickens are omnivores. My mum's farm is well supplied with fresh eggs with fat yolks the colour of dandelions, from hens that are fed from the table scraps and vegetable peelings and basically any organic trash that comes from the kitchen. You can give them meat, bones - even chicken meat, raw or cooked, absolutely no problem.

The only type of table scrap you should not give a hen is raw egg or eggshell. This is not because it's bad for their digestion. In fact, eggshells are a good source of calcium and are often ground up and added to chicken feed. The reason is that you don't want the hens to get used to thinking of eggs as food. If they do, they start eating their own eggs, even if they've got embryos in them.