Do chickens pee?
Chickens don’t pee or urinate, but they do have kidneys that produce urine. It’s one of the most common questions we get, so let’s tackle it once and for all.
Do chickens pee?
Chickens don’t pee with urine streams as they have no bladder or urethra. Their kidneys produce urine with uric acid. This urine leaves the body with droppings via their only opening, the cloaca. The uric acid crystals form a white deposit on chicken poop.
The Chicken’s Urinary System
Like most birds, chickens don’t have a bladder. However, they do have two long kidneys that produce urinal waste.
The kidneys remove waste and toxins from the chicken’s blood. While mammals convert nitrogen to urea and store it in the bladder, the chicken’s kidneys produce non-water soluble uric acid.
The urates with uric acid end up in the urine and travel directly to the chicken’s cloaca via the ureter.
When the urine arrives in the cloaca, it travels back to the large intestine, where the body reabsorbs the water of the urine.
With the water removed, the urine becomes thick and pasty. It’s then mixed with the digested food in the cloaca. The urine and poo are passed in a single dropping where the uric acid creates a white deposit on top of the poo.
Next to their urine streams, chickens can also fart, which is a normal occurrence in their digestive process. But excessive or foul-smelling gas may signal underlying health issues.
Related Questions
Yes, the chicken’s pee and poo are mixed in single droppings. Chickens only have a single vent opening to pass urine and poo. The digested food and urine coming from the kidneys join in the cloaca before leaving the body. The urine forms a white deposit on the chicken’s droppings.
No, chickens do not urinate through their skin. They don’t even have sweat glands. Chickens also don’t urinate in liquid streams, as they don’t have a bladder. Their kidneys produce uric acid that mixes with the droppings in the cloaca. The uric acid forms white crystals on the chicken’s poo.
Chickens don’t pee with urine streams as they don’t have a bladder. Instead, the uric acid in the urine leaves the body along with the droppings. Chickens poop roughly 20 to 50 times a day. Smaller chickens have smaller cloacas and poop more. When chickens roost at night, they keep dropping poo.
Chickens don’t have a bladder, and their urine leaves the body with droppings. Chickens also don’t sleep in their nests, they roost on a roosting bar. They do, however, still drop poo at night. So hens that sleep in the nesting boxes will, in a sense, pee in their nest.
Yes, pee is mixed with poo in the cloaca and leaves the chicken’s body via a single vent opening. In fact, the eggs of laying hens also pass through the same opening. When a hen is laying, its vagina folds inside out to separate the egg from the droppings.
