Egg pecking problem please help

[Habibs Hens]

My white star started laying a few days ago

lovely white pocelain eggs

all my other hens lay brown eggs

i have found only the white eggs gets pecked at

its not eaten but defo gets pecked and destroyed


it seems to me like the egg is a foreign item to my hens and they want to eradicate it

any way i can train my hens to treat this egg as their own

im worried as i have green and blue egg layer juviniles and dont want the same to happen to them when they start to lay

cheers

 

[Renegade Rescue]

I do not know if this will help but willing to share, We had an issue with our chickens and Rooster breaking open eggs to keep us from getting them so we introduced those plastic Easter eggs we got a couple bags of them at a dollar store I think, the plastic eggs were all different colors and when the Rooster and Hens were able to get them open there was nothing inside, This has stopped the behavior from our chickens, we also added oyster shells to their diet for calcium.

 

[Habibs Hens]

my hens get regular oyster shell and it seems they dont break them to eat em

and only break the white one and leave the brown well alone

i think it might be behavioral

it seems to me that they dont recognise the egg and see it as something else that needs to be removed

i will try get some white and green plastic eggs and put those in the nest box

 

[kjxoxo1]

Im going to try that as my hens just started laying!! I celebrated my first egg like maybe 2 days ago and lo and behold, I watched one hen lay and the others immediately peck it before I could run them away!! I was HOT!!!!!!! soooo, we will have plastic eggs all over the dang coop. I waited so long for those eggs and i certainly dont want them pecking it!! I also noticed they were not eating the Purina Omega 3 food that I have purchased for them but immediately ate the Layena crumbles so I am going to change feed and i also put out some oyster shell calcium so...thanks for this idea...I am looking now to find some!!

 

[Renegade Rescue]

We placed one in each nesting box so the flock would think someone laid them then we found them all over the run they have and with in a few days most had been opened at the seam it appears not getting any prize from breaking the eggs stopped them from even bothering to do it anymore. Hope it works for you both like it did for us. Some say to put egg white and mustard in them we never tried this I thought if there is no benefit to it maybe they would just stop. It did appear in our case to work.

 

[azygous]

Renegade has the solution. You need to overwhelm their senses with a lot of plastic white eggs, and an assortment of colors will do it quite well. Put them in the nests, but scatter them on the floor around the coop and run, too.

What you're doing by overwhelming them with all these fake eggs is desensitizing their fixation. It floods their brains with incoming information, causing them, quite fast, to disregard the attraction to white, or even brown eggs.

I discovered this concept when I had to install pinless peepers on a feather picker and the others all ganged up on her to peck them off her beak. I took a dozen peepers from the box and scattered them on the ground around the run. With blue plastic peepers lying all over the place, the hens quickly lost interest in the peeper wearer, and quickly ignored the peepers lying all over the run.

There's always a way to outsmart chickens. We're smarter than they are. Well, I have to keep believing we are, anyway.

 

[Oliveroblong]

Wow, Chicken Obsessed. Desensitizing their fixation. Brilliant! Thank you immensely for this post! We will outsmart those chickens yet!

 

[JeanneKris]

I am trying this tomorrow morning! I am super excited because I am tried of seeing pecked eggs in my coop. I will let you know!