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Your headline in the February issue, “Hens need much more than kitchen waste” and the subsequent remark in the article “chickens eating garden and kitchen waste” is in my opinion misleading.

I am not sure about EU Law but in the UK the act of feeding kitchen waste to any animal (including poultry) is illegal.

The reason is because of the potential for contamination in a domestic kitchen leading to disease transference and disease risk. One project was with two sets of backyard flocks, those fed scraps and those not. In the latter case the incidence of salmonella was 0.05% while in the flocks fed scraps it was 37%! A cabbage leaf from the garden is fine, just not any food that has gone via the kitchen.

Richard Derrick, Aveyron