Chickens pecking on one and other

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am new to this forum and have a question about chickens pecking on one and other. They are laying pullets at 8 weeks of age. They are constantly singiling out about 8 to 10 pullets and canstantly badger them by pecking at their tail feathers until they have open sores. Is there anything that I can add to thier diet or thier enviroment to stop this? There are 70 pullets. The chicken house is 20 ft by 12 feet, they have constant access to the outdoors in an enclosed pen. The pen is 12ft by 60ft. They have more than adequate feeder space. There are 5, 15lb hanging feeders, that are never even close to being crowded with birds feeding. They are fed a commercial poultry ration, Kent Feeds, Chic-Gro. They have a 6th hanging feeder that offers them free choice grit to consume. They have 2 automatic bowl type water fountains to drink from. Hope this is enough information to help answer my questions. Thanks for any help that you may be able to provide.

 

[Chuck]

A bad problem and it's hard to know why this starts but it's very difficult to stop. It's quite unusual in birds that have as much space as yours have.

There are feather pecking sprays available and I find they do help sometimes but you have to spray them regularly. They have a bad taste and this stops them pecking and helps heal the open sores as well. In this case, you spray the ones that are being pecked. Feather loss is not much of a problem but obviously the open wounds are and it can lead to deaths.

If that doesn't work, try beak bits that gamekeepers use for pheasants in release pens. These hold the beak open slightly so that they can't grip the feathers. These you would put in all of them for safety.

Or you could try treating and penning the pecked ones seperately until they heal up & grow the feathers back.

There is nothing that can be added to feed and it won't be deficiency of anything.

In smaller spaces keepers sometimes hang CD's and other things to amuse or distract but I've never used them.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. The peeking escalated yesterday after I posted and we lost 6 pullets as of this last night. Just makes me sick, not knowing how it started or how to stop them. We did order some beek bits yesterday and will try those. Did also hand a bunch of CDs in the coop and in the pen. Also turned the chickens lose in the yard, to give them even more space, after having a conversation with our nieghbors about thier dog being in our yard all thge time, which has kept us from turning them lose in the past. We will see how this all goes and I will report back in a week and let you know if we have solved anything. Again thanks for the input.

 

[Rebelodicus]

Hiya... When I was a lad we used to use "Stockholm tar" in pecking situations like this. It's an antiseptic, changes the colour and protects the bird. 09 05 (We weren't aware of "Bird bits" in the '70's in the Chew Valley :roll: )