this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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That's mostly girl on girl father loss you're seeing. The ones with the missing fathers are at the bottom of the pecking order. It happens in large working flocks. We're running around 50 birds right now.
Interesting, are they fed ad lib? We have kept largish flocks of roosters + breeding hens (20-30), but like 8 rooms with groups that size, year after year, and I’ve not seen much of that even when feed is restricted. But my experience with them is in a research setting, and they are a more uniform size/age/breed. It doesn’t do them harm to lose the feathers anyway, as long as their rooster isn’t too aggressive!
The free feed. They have clean water and high quality feed at all times. None of them is suffering for food. None of the hens has breeding injuries. The roosters breed them but the hens are worse. This happens in every large laying flock I've ever seen on any farm including year after year on ours. These aren't pets. They're working bids. I'm not going to chase them around and put sweaters on them.
Oh yeah not for some feather loss, we never bothered with the jackets either really. I only mention it because we did have to euthanize a few hens due to the severity of the wounds the roosters could inflict - and those boys didn’t even have spurs! But since it’s not your roosters causing it there isn’t much concern it’s going to get to that point.
Now our roosters are fully spurred. We never have mating injuries. They are pretty good to the girls but Big Guy takes a run at my wife every now and then and needs to be reminded of him place on the pecking order. One time last year I had to despur him and carry him around upside down a couple of times. That seemed to have settled him right down.
With a flock the size of ours we don't waste a lot of time with injured birds. It it's spring or summer and we have an empty pen we will isolate them and nurse them back to health. Going into winter and in the depths of winter a serious injury is a death sentence. We just don't have the resources to try to save a single bird.