HELP! My hens are murders!!!

[Wyorp Rock]

If you've still got the ladies in a run with this big of wire spacing it would be no problem for a weasel to get inside and cause chaos. It takes fort knox to keep those out and even then it is iffy.View attachment 1526499

I saw that too, but was waiting to see if OP would provide more information (photos/sq ft of coop and run)

 

[Flockandfowl46]

If I read correctly, you are feeding scratch and veggie scraps and some treats? If that's the case your gals may be protein deprived and it caused cannibalism. I would recommend an all flock feed and free choice oyster shell calcium especially if they don't free range what your feeding is mostly fat and fiber it's not enough hun

 

[chickengeorgeto]

There are several post from folks with red toe nails who wear open toed sandals asking about why their hens are pecking their painted toe nails. This should convince anyone that chickens are mesmerized by the color red. Once blood is drawn then the cat is out of the bag and chickens may well peck their coop mates to death.

 

[Criticalicious]

OP said 10 gal gravity feeder but didn't specify what kind of feed is in it. I would assume it's full of layer feed of some kind. So the chickens are getting plenty of nutrition. The culprit is more likely a predator, whether OP wants to believe that or not.

 

[Sneebsey]

I'd like to see the corpses if possible. It does sound like a weasel/stoat/polecat attack to me, as @Ridgerunner has suggested, and seeing the bodies of the birds would help to confirm that. That family tend to eat the necks and heads of the birds and not much else, but will kill everyone they can for the pleasure of it.

Sorry that you lost your birds, @Impatient , but I find it highly unlikely that your older birds will have deliberately killed the younger birds in order to eat them.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

.... Chickens are omnivores. Of course they'll go after minnows... but I've never heard of birds killing and eating each other if they don't get fed animal products. A well balanced commercial diet with the occasional treats, scraps, and whatever they find on range will keep them quite happy.

At one time commercial chicken feed all contained animal protein. This protein was usually in the form of tankage (slaughter house by products) blood meal, bone meal, or dairy by products usually in the form of dehydrated buttermilk or else whey. Now days the animal protein has been replaced by soybean meal which is steamed, roasted, or boiled soybeans that are ground to a paste and has had the soybean oil either pressed out or else expelled using a chemical solvent. Certan humane organizations made the removal of animal protein in chicken feed a top priority starting in the 60s or 70s. In the commercial chicken industry this is not a big problem because no frier or laying hen lives long enough or is raised in a setting where there are any hens present except that all of the hens present in commercial operations are all of the same age group or class.

Chickens will also horribly mutilate each other if they are raised in too close confinement. It would not surprise me to learn that the problem mentioned by the OP began with his or her young birds then it spread to the older birds. This is the reason that chicken keepers are constantly advised to intervene in the pecking order squabbles once their hens draw blood.

 

[Sneebsey]

Replacing 'byproducts', aka manufacturing waste with actual food grown for a purpose is not a bad thing by any means. I would also argue that it was not humane organisations that pushed for the removal of these products from our animal feed, but rather the rise of BSE, TB and the like which forced the issue. I saw a retrospective recently on the rise of BSE here in the UK in the 80s-90s, and it discussed a history of pigs and cattle being fed slaughterhouse offal, the revelation of which caused Europe to essentially black-list our beef. The good old days really weren't all that good.

 

[Justso]

This is a fully enclosed coop/run situation. I did consider a predator, but that would be limited to cats or raccoons and both of those could easily take on or at least injure the big girls and they haven't been touched at all. All the bodies were found in the coop, I found no holes or break in points that leads me to believe anything got in. A predator also tends to try and take their meal with them, these bodies were just left there...

I'm late to revise my opinion, if it had been cannibalism I think that you would have seen some heavy aggressive behavior by your hens. This goes on over time and builds, usually with one victim at a time. I've lost to raccoons, they tend to kill and take away or partially eat on the spot. The only killer I've seen that will kill and leave a carcass is a weasel or stoat. it would be shocked that they're around, I'm in suburban Chicago and they exist in my area. I lost 3 adults one summer. My neighbor lost a whole cage of button quail. The stoat ate and got so fat it was stuck inside the cage.

 

[LRH97]

Chickens will also horribly mutilate each other if they are raised in too close confinement. It would not surprise me to learn that the problem mentioned by the OP began with his or her young birds then it spread to the older birds. This is the reason that chicken keepers are constantly advised to intervene in the pecking order squabbles once their hens draw blood.

Absolutely. However it still seems the most probable cause for the death of these birds is predation of some sort and the other birds then picking at the carcasses, which I would still technically call cannibalism, but only because of their attraction to bright colors (red) and probably not resulting from protein deficiency.

 

[paul ngweshela]

So sorry dear