Can Chickens Eat Chicken Liver? Cooked, Yes. Raw, No

Yes, chickens can eat chicken liver, as long as it’s cooked all the way through and nothing has been added to it. Keep the piece small, though, because liver is packed with vitamin A. Raw liver is the part I’d never share, since USDA says chicken liver can carry germs inside, where a quick sear likely won’t kill them all. And if your hens live in the UK, liver is out completely, because feeding meat to them is against the law there, even when they’re kept as pets.

I rewrote this page from 20 sources, and they’re all listed at the bottom. The safety facts come from USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and from three CDC outbreak reports on chicken liver. The nutrient numbers are from USDA’s FoodData Central. The vitamin A limits come from the Merck Veterinary Manual and from a 2023 review of the poultry research. The feeding rules come from Merck and from five extension services, and the UK rule comes from the UK government’s own pages.

The old version of this page was mostly stories I can’t vouch for, so they’re gone. It told of a hen named Bessie and of something it called the Great Liver Rebellion. Half of it wasn’t about liver at all. It covered breeds and egg recipes, plus a deworming schedule and a bleach routine with no source behind either one. I cut all of it.

A note on the photos. None of them shows chicken liver, because I couldn’t find a free photo of it that passed my checks. The raw chicken was shot in Calgary, and the fridge drawer and the thermometer come from USDA. The hens are from Tamsin Cooper’s photos of 2013, and the white hen was photographed at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall.

The short version.

• Cooked, plain liver is fine as a small treat. Cook it to 165°F in the middle, checked with a food thermometer.
• Never share it raw or pink. USDA says germs can sit inside chicken liver, where a sear likely won’t kill them all.
• Go easy on the amount. A 10 gram piece of simmered liver holds about 4 times a laying hen’s daily vitamin A need, by my math, and a whole liver holds about 18 times.
• Pick up leftovers within 5 to 10 minutes. In the UK, skip liver altogether. If a hen seems off after eating it, call a vet who sees poultry. We aren’t vets.

Chickens Eat Meat, and Liver Is Rich Meat

Meat isn’t a strange food for a chicken. UC Davis puts it plainly in its flock feeding guide: “Chickens are omnivores meaning they eat both animal protein and plant produced foods”. Alabama Extension adds that plenty of layer feeds are vegetarian anyway, and says that trend “has, in part, been more about marketing than actual nutrition”. So liver isn’t an odd thing for a hen to eat. It’s just an unusually rich one.

Here’s how rich. USDA’s FoodData Central lists simmered chicken liver at 24.5 grams of protein per 100 grams. Alabama Extension wants a layer feed with “around 18 percent crude protein”, and its feed table says “Protein 16% or more”. So cooked liver carries roughly 1.4 to 1.5 times the protein of her feed, by my math. The same USDA entry lists 11.6 mg of iron and 13,300 IU of vitamin A per 100 grams, and that last number is the one to watch.

Rich isn’t the same as better. Alabama Extension reminds flock owners that complete feeds “are designed to be the sole source of nutrients for your birds”. It also warns that “Overconsuming protein and minerals can lead to urinary system problems”. A bag of layer feed from the feed store already covers what she needs, so liver is an extra on top, and a small one.

Our Can Chickens Eat It? checker doesn’t rate liver. Type it in and you get “Not rated here”. The rest of this page is my read of the sources that do cover it, food safety first. For another meat from the kitchen, our page on hamburger for chickens runs the same kind of checks on ground beef.

Why Raw Liver Is the Part to Skip

Here’s the catch with liver. In July 2018, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put out a guideline on chicken liver alone. It says “chicken liver can contain pathogens internally, even when chickens are dressed in a sanitary manner”. The studies it cites found Campylobacter inside 10% to 90% of tested livers, after the outside had been sanitized.

The germs seem to get there from inside the bird. FSIS says researchers found Campylobacter and Salmonella in the livers of chickens that were free of them until they were given the germs by mouth. The germs are thought to travel from the intestine to the liver, it says, though “the exact route is unclear”. That’s why a quick sear won’t do it. Partial cooking “may kill pathogens on the external surface, but will likely not kill all pathogens in the internal tissue”, the guideline says.

The outbreaks back that up. FSIS cites a 2017 summary that counted 22 outbreaks of Campylobacter and Salmonella illness tied to chicken liver in the US from 2000 to 2015, with 331 reported illnesses. In one that CDC wrote up in 2015, two Oregon restaurants made pâté from undercooked livers. Their supplier in Washington state said it rinsed the livers in a chlorine solution before packing them. Even so, five of nine raw liver samples grew Campylobacter jejuni.

The report is blunt about it. “Chicken livers and pâté should be considered inherently risky foods, given the methods by which they are routinely prepared”, it says. Then it adds “Washing is insufficient to render chicken livers safe for consumption”. Inspected livers “are not required to be free from bacteria”, it adds, and one study it cites found Campylobacter in 77% of the chicken livers cultured.

Now, all of that is about people. I couldn’t find a study that fed raw liver to backyard hens, so I can’t tell you what it does to them. What CDC does say is that backyard poultry “can sometimes carry germs that can make people sick”, and its list of those germs includes Campylobacter and Salmonella. It also says eggshells “may become contaminated with Salmonella and other germs from poultry droppings”.

CDC’s page on chicken says “1 in 25” packages of chicken at the grocery store are contaminated with Salmonella. My read: there’s no sense carrying a fresh dose of store germs into your run and toward your egg basket, when cooking the liver takes care of it. So cook it.

Keep It Cold Until It Cooks

Liver doesn’t keep long, so buy it close to the day you’ll cook it. FSIS recommends using chicken liver within one to two days in a refrigerator set at 40 °F or below. In a freezer at 0 °F or below, it’s good for three to four months. CDC says to keep raw chicken on the bottom shelf of the fridge in a sealed container, or wrapped well, so the juice can’t leak onto other food.

Freezing helps, but it doesn’t make raw liver safe. FSIS says freezing “can reduce, but not eliminate, Campylobacter contamination of chicken liver”. The CDC reports show what that looks like. In the 2012 outbreak in the Northeast, both restaurants froze their fresh livers until they needed them, and the livers were still only lightly cooked when they were served. In the 2015 report, a Washington resident got sick after eating raw chicken livers that had been chopped into pill-sized pieces and frozen. The frozen pieces still grew C. jejuni. Cold alone isn’t enough.

Handle it like any raw chicken while you work. CDC says to wash your hands with soap and water “for at least 20 seconds before and after handling raw chicken”, and to use a separate cutting board for it. Scrub the board and the knife in hot, soapy water when you’re done. Once the liver is cooked, CDC says leftover chicken should go in the fridge or freezer within 2 hours, or within 1 hour if it’s sitting somewhere above 90°F. My call: I’d hold the hen’s cooked share to that same clock until it goes out to the run.

Cook It to 165°F and Keep It Plain

The number to hit is 165°F. FSIS says chicken liver should be eaten “only after being cooked throughout to a safe minimum internal temperature of 165 °F (73.9 °C) as measured with a food thermometer”. It adds that this should be done “regardless of preferences”. Pink in the middle doesn’t count for you. My call: I’d hold her piece to the same 165°F.

Don’t trust your eyes on this one. In July 2016, an outbreak in Clark County, Washington, was linked to a restaurant’s chicken liver mousse. The CDC report says the sous-chef “used the appearance of the livers alone to determine whether they were fully cooked”. When the inspector measured the largest liver, it was under 130°F. It looked done to the cook. My call: put the thermometer in the biggest piece in the pan.

A little extra time doesn’t hurt, either. The 2013 CDC report cites studies from outside the US on this. To be free of Campylobacter, they found, chicken livers had to be heated past 158 °F (70 °C) “and held at that temperature for 2–3 minutes”. I’d simmer the hen’s liver in plain water and give it a couple of minutes past 165°F. That’s also why I’d skip pâté for her, since the 2015 report says pâté made with chicken liver “is often undercooked to preserve texture”.

Plain matters as much as cooked. Colorado State says scraps for chickens should not be salty, and it puts onions on its list of foods to avoid. Kentucky’s Jacquie Jacob says strong-tasting scraps “such as onions” shouldn’t go to laying hens “because eggs might take on those flavors”. And Merck’s chapter on backyard flocks says fat scraps “promote the development of fatty liver and acute death from liver rupture”. So set the hen’s piece aside before you season anything, and before any butter or onion goes in the pan. Our page on what not to feed chickens has the rest of the foods to keep out of the run.

A Little Liver Goes a Long Way

Vitamin A is the reason to keep the piece small. Merck’s table for Leghorn-type layers lists 3,000 IU of vitamin A per kilogram of feed, and it assumes a hen eats 110 grams of feed a day. That works out to about 330 IU a day, by my math. USDA lists 13,300 IU in 100 grams of simmered chicken liver. So a 10 gram piece carries about 1,330 IU, roughly 4 times her daily need in a single bite. That adds up fast.

A whole liver is a lot more. USDA puts one simmered chicken liver at 44 grams, which comes to about 5,850 IU, or close to 18 times her daily need, by my math. That’s before you count the vitamin A already in her feed.

Her feed likely has more than that bare need in it already. Merck says the safety margin added on top of the vitamin requirement in a diet tends to be high, because vitamins are cheap and carry “minimal risk of toxicity”. Hens do seem to have some room above it. A 2023 review led by Rifat Ullah Khan describes a 15-week trial on Hy-Line white layers. They got 5,000 to 25,000 IU of vitamin A per kilogram of feed, with “no negative impact on egg weight or egg production”. The review also notes that their egg yolks lost vitamin E, which it counts as a negative effect. At 110 grams of feed a day, the top of that range is about 2,750 IU a day, by my math. One 10 gram piece of liver adds about half that.

There is a ceiling, though. The same review cites March and colleagues, who gave hens 210,000 to 410,000 IU per kilogram of feed. They found “a drop in egg weight and a significant decrease in egg production”. At 110 grams of feed a day, the low end of that is about 23,100 IU a day. That’s the vitamin A in roughly 174 grams of simmered liver, by my math. That’s more liver than a hen eats feed in a day. Merck also warns that “excessive levels of fat-soluble vitamin intake over prolonged periods can lead to toxicities”, and it counts vitamin A among the fat-soluble ones.

My call: a small piece once in a while is nowhere near those levels. A big piece every day for weeks is a different question, and none of the studies I read tested a liver habit like that in hens. So I’d keep it occasional, and I’d keep it small.

The treat math lands in the same spot. Alabama Extension says a laying hen will eat “between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day”. Colorado State says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet”. That’s 10 to 15 grams of treats a day, with every treat she gets added together. A single 44 gram liver is about three to four times that, by my math.

So one liver is plenty for a small flock.

Here’s how I’d share it.

• Simmer one liver in plain water until a food thermometer reads 165°F in the thickest part.
• Let it cool and chop it fine. One liver cut into 10 gram bits covers the treat share of about four hens, by my math.
• Serve it in a shallow dish with the feeder full and fresh water out. If your hens already had treats today, give less.
• Leave it out for chicks. Alabama Extension says pullets should get a complete starter/grower diet from 1 to 6 weeks of age “as their sole source of nutrition”.

Then pick up whatever’s left. Colorado State says not to feed more than they can finish in “5 – 10 minutes to not attract nuisance animals”. Kentucky’s guide gives all the scraps 20 minutes at most, and it adds “Make sure that the scraps are not allowed to rot, or botulism might result”. I wouldn’t leave meat in the run overnight for any raccoon or rat to find.

The Cannibal Worry, Checked

You might worry that feeding chickens chicken teaches them to eat each other. I went looking for a source that says so, and I didn’t find one. The vet and extension pages I read on cannibalism don’t list eating meat, or liver, as a cause.

What they do name is a mix of stress and setup. Merck’s chapter, by Rocio Crespo, says “No single cause of cannibalism in poultry has been identified”. It ties the habit to crowding and genetics. Bright light plays a part, and so does an unbalanced diet. Merck also names short feeder space, and dead birds that don’t get removed every day. Kentucky’s Jacquie Jacob calls cannibalism “a learned behavior that can spread quickly through a flock”, and links it to diets short on protein and certain minerals.

Blood is what the sources keep coming back to. Jacob says “chickens are attracted to blood”, so one hurt bird can set off the rest. Merck says blood on exposed skin “may induce more pecking and lead to death”, and once the habit takes hold, “it is difficult to eliminate”. Penn State Extension says birds “will pick on crippled or dead birds in their pens because of the social order and curiosity”.

My call: the worry doesn’t hold up against what I read, but the blood part is worth taking seriously. Cooking helps here too, since it leaves no raw, red chunk for the flock to squabble over. I’d chop the liver small and scatter it so nobody has to fight for a piece. If a bird dies, get her out of the run the same day. Our page on whether chickens will eat a dead hen covers that one.

In the UK, Liver Is Off the Menu

If your hens live in the UK, you can skip the cooking tips. The Animal and Plant Health Agency says it’s illegal to feed “meat or meat products to farmed animals”. In a January 2017 warning, it told farmers and smallholders not to feed kitchen or catering waste to pigs and poultry, “even if they are being kept as pets”.

Liver is meat, so it’s out.

The rule is there to keep devastating animal diseases out. The warning also asks smallholders to “help safeguard the health and welfare of their animals” by keeping kitchen waste away from them. It isn’t a finding that liver is bad for hens. The same warning names African and Classical Swine Fever, along with Foot and Mouth disease. It says the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak most likely came from “pigs being fed undercooked catering waste containing the virus”. More than 10 million cattle and sheep were destroyed. The government’s guidance on animal feed spells out the kitchen part: “It is illegal to use catering waste from kitchens which handle meat”.

The US is different. The federal rule I found on feeding food waste, 9 CFR Part 166, restricts feeding garbage to swine, and it says nothing about feeding it to chickens. I didn’t check every state’s rules, so if you’re outside the UK, look up your own state or country before liver goes in the run.

One last thing. If a hen got into a whole liver, or she acts off after any treat, call a vet who sees poultry. Have that number handy before you need it. We aren’t vets, and this page doesn’t stand in for one.

Sources

• USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service: FSIS Guideline, Chicken Liver (July 2018).
• CDC, MMWR: Multistate Outbreak of Campylobacter jejuni Infections Associated with Undercooked Chicken Livers, Northeastern United States, 2012 (2013).
• Magdalena Kendall Scott and colleagues, CDC, MMWR: Campylobacteriosis Outbreak Associated with Consuming Undercooked Chicken Liver Pâté, Ohio and Oregon, December 2013 to January 2014 (2015).
• Glashower and colleagues, CDC, MMWR: Outbreak of Campylobacter jejuni Associated with Consuming Undercooked Chicken Liver Mousse, Clark County, Washington, 2016 (2017).
• CDC: Chicken and Food Poisoning.
• CDC: Backyard Poultry.
• USDA FoodData Central: chicken liver, all classes, cooked, simmered (SR Legacy 171061).
• Doug Korver, Merck Veterinary Manual: Nutritional Requirements of Poultry.
• Rifat Ullah Khan and colleagues, Antioxidants: Pros and Cons of Dietary Vitamin A and Its Precursors in Poultry Health and Production, a Comprehensive Review (2023).
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry.
• Rocio Crespo, Merck Veterinary Manual: Cannibalism in Poultry.
• Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, Poultry Extension: Feather Pecking and Cannibalism in Small and Backyard Poultry Flocks.
• Penn State Extension, Poultry Cannibalism: Prevention and Treatment (updated June 15, 2026).
• Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way, Disease Control and Feeding.
• Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis: Feeding your Flock.
• Wilmer Pacheco and colleagues, Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913, 2022).
• Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, Poultry Extension: Feeding Chickens for Egg Production.
• Animal and Plant Health Agency: warning on feeding kitchen scraps to livestock (11 January 2017).
• UK government guidance: Supplying and using animal by-products as farm animal feed.
• Code of Federal Regulations, Title 9, Part 166: Swine Health Protection.

Sources checked November 1, 2026. USDA’s food safety site and CDC turned bots away that day, and so did the publisher of the vitamin A review, so I read those through the Internet Archive’s copies. The per-hen math is mine, from these sources, and so are the vitamin A comparisons. So are the calls on raw liver and on how much to share. We aren’t vets. If a hen ate a lot of liver, or acts off, call a vet who sees poultry.

Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe