Coop cannibalism rears its ugly head
Once a chicken discovers how tasty eggs are, experts say its a hard habit to break
Restaurant critic Amy Pataki and her family decided to rent chickens this summer. This is the seventh in an occasional series on backyard livestock. The happy hen story takes a dark turn. Chickens eating their own eggs. Poultry people call it cannibalism. It started with us forgetting to add crushed oyster shells to the chicken feed. Blair, Julep and Zazu need this calcium supplement to lay proper eggs. Without calcium, the egg comes out as soft and floppy as one of Dali’s melting clocks.
(Hens, like human females, don’t need a male around to ovulate. The birds produce unfertilized eggs almost daily.)
We didn’t notice the squishy egg until too late. It had no shell, just a thin membrane. We found it collapsed in the coop, smears of yolk amongst the bedding. It either broke on its own or the chickens pecked it open.
This can be a serious problem. Once a chicken discovers how tasty eggs are, experts say it’s a hard habit to break.
Just this week, Blair laid a soft-shelled egg — her second egg of the day — on the wire bottom of the coop, not in her usual nesting box. Zazu swooped in. Our daughter Ella tried to shoo her off but Zazu soon had yolk all over her beak.
To make sure this behaviour doesn’t escalate to normal, hard-shelled eggs, we first looked to the internet, where sources said to temporarily isolate the perpetrator. Difficult since we have just the one coop and I’m against moving a chicken inside our home.
I find a better answer in a textbook written by no less an authority than the Queen’s former veterinary surgeon; our veterinarian friend gave us the book as a henhouse-warming present.
Dr. Alistair Fraser recommends putting a nasty tasting ringer in the nest.
“Take an egg and carefully cut a hole on one side. The easiest way to do this is to crack it gently against a hard surface, then slip a scalpel into the crack to widen it. Remove the contents and replace them with freshly made mustard,” Fraser writes in The Complete Book of Raising Livestock and Poultry. “I have never know this to fail.” (I’ll let him know if it works.) Another form of cannibalism can rear its ugly head. It’s the pernicious habit of hens pecking each other bloody, or worse.
“Multiple birds may peck at each other’s bodies, leading to feather loss and eventually bleeding wounds, or the whole flock may gang up on one unfortunate individual and peck it to death,” Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens says.
This thankfully hasn’t been the case amongst our backyard flock, which is neither stressed nor bored nor fighting for dominance.
Then there’s the true meaning of cannibalism: ingesting the flesh of your own kind.
Once, I fed our birds bits of chicken meat from the stock pot. They gobbled it up obliviously.
It didn’t feel right. I prefer to supplement their diet with overripe fruit, table scraps — and crushed oyster shells. Mustn’t forget those.