i have a can-able chicken

[peep peep betty]

ok so i walked out side and my chicken had something in her mouth so i went to see what it was.IT WAS ONE OF HER EGGS.she had went to her nest poked her beak into her egg and carried it away from her nest and was eating its yolk and then when she left the other chickens where fight over what was left.should i be worried and what could cause this she has never done it before.

 

[realsis]

If she starts eating her own eggs you might want to try emptying a egg out and put mustard in it. This way when she goes to eat the egg she gets the mustard. A few of these mustard eggs and hopefully she will break the habbit. I'd start the mustard as soon as possible. Egg eating can be a very bad habit and once they get the taste for the egg they usually continue. So in order to break her of this habit try doing the mustard eggs. Hopefully this will help break the habbit. Hope this helps and best wishes.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Almost any chicken will eat an opened egg. That’s not an egg eater or a real problem. An egg eater is one that purposely breaks an egg to eat it. That is a huge problem.

I don’t know which your hen is. It’s possible that egg was accidentally broken and she was just cleaning it up. Is the shell really thin? Sometimes that contributes to an egg being accidentally opened. That is a way a hen becomes an egg eater though, an egg gets broken accidentally and she associates the egg itself to a meal.

I had one of those once, a hen that would purposely open one or two eggs a day. It took a while to identify which one it was and I permanently removed her from the flock. Some others would help her finish the eggs once she opened them but never learned to open them themselves. That’s another risk, that she teaches others to open an egg. I’d treat it seriously though the answer may be to thicken the egg shells up if it was an accident.

I haven’t read this thread but it has a lot of input. You can get other people’s ideas on how to deal with the problem if eating her isn’t a good solution for you if you have to do something.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/842021/egg-eating

One option is to build a roll-away nest box. That’s where the egg rolls out of the nest and into an area the hen can’t get to it.

Good luck! This can be frustrating.