Chicken legs keep getting hurt

ilovemybabies2

In the Brooder
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Like the title says... We have a ladder in the coop. Some fly the coop, some walk the ladder. I have a bsl that has a bad limp for a while...got worse. 3 rir that are all injured. One got an owie. One is limping and so is the other. I have 4 chickens with injured legs...is this normal???
 
A picture of the roost and ladder might help. But my guess is that it's too steep and they're flying down, and/or the ground may be too hard for them when they land.
 
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If they are roosting in the rafters, then its probably too high. That looks to be 8 to 10 feet high. The chickens may not be able to slow themselves down when flying down to the floor.
 
Yep - that's what I imagined. You might try adding a *lot* of litter to the floor to cushion the landing, or it it was me I'd block off the rafters with plastic netting so they can't get up there (if you don't have too many chickens to comfortably roost on the lower bar to the left).

It looks from the picture that they can't fly down to easily due to limited space, so they might just be kinda jumping down from a pretty big height which is hurting their legs. Also looks like a concrete floor with very little litter...hard landing there too.

In our old coop they'd roost about 4 feet up but there was *very* limited space to get down...they would have to hop on two other bars to get to the ground, otherwise they'd hit the nest boxes. I watched them several times and they had a lot of trouble hitting the other bars coming down...sometimes slipping, sometimes just going for it and hitting the nest boxes. One of my buff orpingtons got fed up with the whole process and would wait on the top bar for me each morning...would walk over to me when I opened the door, and let me put her down by hand...pretty funny.
 
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