The secret of training your chicks to be great lap chickens is to spend as much time with them as possible. The best way is to let them hang out on your lap at least once a day. We have several used bath towels just for this purpose. We keep them near our chairs all the time. We grab our chicks from the baby box, and let them loose on the lap towels while we eat breakfast. We usually keep a small amount of the baby food and water in small trays so that the chicks can snack when they are on our laps.

Since we eat omelet every morning, the chicks become familiar with it, and eventually start eating tiny pieces of it from our hand. They have a natural instinct to avoid wet food because it feels like poo. They are very clean conscious and try to avoid touching poo as much as possible. But the chicks learn what is edible, and tasty fairly quickly.

They will also get used to be handled by us, and become more comfortable with climbing into our hands to rest when they get tired playing on the lap. They start associating the towels as the extension of our body.

(photo: Shantie, the Buff Orpington, on the left, Sophie, the White Rock, on the right, on Peter’s lap during breakfast)