Chicken bullying. Is it normal? Anything to worry about?

[Kuncerned]

I'm not a chicken owner. In the future I probably will be, but until then I have enjoyed seeing other peoples' chickens graze freely among their properties

At the end of May of this year my next-door-neighbor built a coop and got 26 chickens. He had never owned chickens before.

During the first heat wave of the summer, six chickens died.

Throughout the summer, his chickens have wandered into my yard and I LOVE it because I LOVE the idea of chickens getting free range rather than being cooped up in a coop so I have accommodated these chickens as best as I can and let them wander through my yard as much as they want.

Some of the chickens have increasingly been losing feathers on their necks (probably 40% of them).

These bullied chickens now have completely featherless necks and are missing feathers on their upper torso areas.

While mowing the grass tonight I saw two instances of a chicken jumping onto another chicken and holding it down with its claws/feet and using its beak to rip feathers from the body of the victim chicken.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was such an act of viciousness and (most likely) explains why so many of the chickens had suddenly become "bald" over the summer.

Is this something to be concerned about and be reported, or should I stand by and watch the "bully" chickens rip the feathers out of the docile ones?

I hate animal cruelty even if it comes at the behest of other animals so please let me know if this is something that needs to be stopped.

 

[junebuggena]

That sounds like an over enthusiastic cockerel to me. Some boys are very rough on the girls. To mate, a rooster will jump up onto a hen's back, grab the back of her neck, and dig his spurs in, to hold himself in position. It can be fairly rough, and disconcerting for those who have never witnessed it before. It can take a young flock several weeks or even months before the boys learn to give the girls a bit of warning, and the girls learn to hold still.
If you ever do decide to get a flock of your own, be aware that the 'resident' flock will not be happy about the new birds in 'their' area. You will have to keep your birds contained, or there may be serious fights.

 

[Kuncerned]

Is there ever a possibility that a hen would attack another chicken in the way that I described above? Bare with me because I'm not well versed with chicken phrases and stuff, but amongst all these chickens that I wrote of, I've seen only one with a red comb-over-mohawk and red flappy-adams-apple thing, so I assume this is the cockerel you speak of.

There are some all-brown, full-figured chickens running among this flock and at least one of these birds (which I assume are the hens) are responsible for the chicken baldness because this evening I saw one of them jump onto another and hold it down and then watch it's head bob up-and-down in jackahmmer fashion while it pecked at the neck of the victim.

PS: As much as I've wanted chicken, I won't get any unless they are the only flock around. ;-)