Quote:
Originally Posted by
AlotaBitCountry 
i went to the tractor supply store and asked about the purple stuff they had sprayed on their chicks to keep them from pecking eachother... she told me it was poultry protector, so i got some and used some.. is this really going to help them stop pecking at eachother? the bottle says mostly that its just to prevent mites and lice and such and keep the coop sanitary, it doesnt say anything about stopping chicks from pecking one another...
any thoughts?
Our experience was a Winter of picking and bleeding... We tried Bluecote (the purple stuff) with very limited success. It fixed a couple of the many chickens we had that were affected. We then moved on to blinders... also with very limited success. Some more chickens got better and it seemed to help lower the instances of "bloody butt", but we still had 6 - 8 effected. My last resort I found was debeaking... I did not like doing this one bit!!! I was, however, at my wits end and ready to cull out a bunch of bird. This again had limited success... We got to a point where we only had 3-4 with raw bums... I then studied the bird looking for "The Pickers". I began to catch them and band their legs to identify the "Problem Birds". I had 5 birds that were the culprits! I had one of them that was REALLY BAD! I kept catching the same one and double banded her legs. I then remembered that when you introduce a new chicken to an existing flock that they would immediately become the bird on the totem pole, so to speak. So I took the worst girl and stuck in our "Pet/Mutt" flock... She got her but kicked by the girls in there! She spent weeks as the odd man(girl) out. Now back in the laying flock bums began healing and there was very limited picking happening. I continued to watch and found one more hen that picked more that the others, so I suck here in with our Easter Egger flock... Same exact story.
Now our Laying flock has no more bloody bums and from what I can tell, are not being picked anymore. Now because this took soooooooo long to find a resolution.. some of the girls are bald and are not showing any sign of the feathers coming back. Maybe when they have their first molt...? not sure.
Sorry for the long post, but I want to give you the whole story. Good luck. Let me know if you have any questions on our details.