Do not throw away rice to birds
Why I say so?
1. First reason is animals not domesticated (except perhaps cats and dogs-even that I may be wrong) eat raw food or ripened fruits.
2. There digestive enzymes are able to deal with grains unlike hours.
3. Birds scatter seeds (not rice) helping the ecosystem.
4. Cooked rice get contaminated with bacteria because of the high content of water.
4. One of the nasty one is Bacillus cereus (means coming from cereals)
It causes under 24 hour illnesses (within 2 hours vomiting or food poisoning or after 8 hours infection with diarrhoea).
5. Infectious one was named Cholera cereus decades ago why they gave a respectable name, I am puzzled.
6. The toxins are heat resistant and mild heating does not destroy them.
7. They form endospores which are also heat resistant.
8. Cooling and reheating encourage spore formation and these spores can contaminate other food items in the fridge/freezer.
Rice uncooked can be preserved in dry condition for ages.
Cooked rice can be kept only for two hours the most.
So eat your rice and do not throw away the rice to rot and then expects the birds to eat.
Bird do not eat the stale rice but the ant do take them and store.
9. You have more ants in your pantry or back garden.
My advice is to cook only the desired amount of rice or if you are lazy buy a rice packet.
10. Birds prefer the seeds and better still watch them split the husk before eating.
House sparrows (extinct species) were very clever at that.
Their bills are built for that purpose and for building nests.
If you watch how a parrot takes the bean out of the pods one by one, you will never throw rice at them.
The bottom line is, the stale rice is very unpleasant sight and awful.
Why do want your pantry smelling?
11. Mind you our gecko loves cooked rice (apart from all the insects) and they grow in numbers and are very active at dusk.
I hate gecko specially their smelly droppings but not so much the cockroaches. There is a nasty venomous snake that love geckos as food.
Otherwise we can never exterminate them.
You may have t breed the deadly snake (Thel karawala or the Ceylon krait) instead.
Below is a American lady’s experience with rice.
Yes Americans do eat rice.
Reproduction
4 Signs Your Cooked Rice Has Gone Bad
Rice is one of those pantry staples that seems to have an indefinite shelf life. And while this is mostly true with uncooked rice (the exception being brown rice), cooked rice has a limit to how long it will last. You've done the sniff test, but are you still not sure? Maybe you can't remember how long it's been in the fridge? Here's how to make the call on when to toss it.
As for how long cooked rice lasts, it can vary, and it largely depends on how the rice is cooled and stored. But it's generally a good idea to call it quits if you've had it for three to four days.
Most foods offer telltale signs that they've gone bad, but with rice it's not always quite so obvious. You also need to rely on other (less obvious) signs that your rice has gone bad.
1. It's super hard and dry.
This is your visual clue that the cooked rice in your fridge has reached the end of its days. Leftover rice will dry out more each day it sits in the fridge. But once the grains have become super hard, dry, or even crunchy, chances are that it's been in the fridge well over a few days. Rice is best when eaten a few days from when it's cooked. Any more than that and it's safest to just toss it. Maximize the shelf life of cooked rice by storing it in an airtight container.
2. It was left unrefrigerated for too long.
It's best to minimize the time cooked rice is left at room temperature. The moisture-rich environment offers ideal conditions for bacterial growth. And while refrigeration doesn't stop that growth altogether, it certainly slows it down.
Uncooked rice can contain spores of a bacterium known as Bacillus cereus. Even after cooking, these spores can still survive. When the cooked rice isn't handled, cooled, stored, or reheated properly, the bacteria can cause food poisoning.
So, if you left cooked rice sitting at room temperature for more than two hours before stashing it in the fridge, it might be better to cut your losses and toss it in the compost or trash.
3. It's been cooled and reheated multiple times.
It's best to minimize the number of times rice (and most foods, for that matter) are cooled and reheated. This presents an ideal environment for bacteria to grow. A good rule of thumb is to reheat leftover rice no more than once. After that it's safest to toss any additional leftovers.
Instead, if you find yourself with more rice than you can eat in a meal or two, go ahead and freeze the leftovers for another time.
4. It has an unpleasant smell.
If there's an unpleasant smell coming from your rice, it's a clear sign that it's time to toss it immediately. By this time that rice has certainly been in the fridge for more than four days, and it's no longer safe to eat.
