I think I found a miracle cure for feather picking

[kandrews]

I've been fighting feather picking forever & a day. Here's the peepers, every anti picking solution none to man kind. I mean I have boxes of this junk. I curbed it finally but they still pick each other some. I could literally right a book on the subject. I saw this & was concerned as well about it being for horses & asked. Like cat food some people feed this I don't. I got Forco & have fed it to my chickens twice they loved it. It does smell rich & I even felt like trying it myself. I will continue using this Forco & see what happens.

What kind of chickens are these?

 

[azygous]

Lacy, thanks for pointing that out about other nutrients. I grow a lot of carrots and squash in summer to store over winter to feed to the chickens, so they should be getting plenty of Vitamin C in these fresh veggies. As for sun, they do get a lot of sunlight through the translucent pen roof side panels. They take sun baths all winter long.

Flo's poops look as normal as the others'. I do pay attention to that every morning when cleaning the coops. Hers are robust and classic brown with a nice white dollop.

I do believe she has a unique problem absorbing nutrients, though. It would account for her being under-sized until she started on Forco, after which she went through a noticeable growth spurt.

If the feather eating is an habitual thing, I was hoping she could be discouraged by being in jail. But she seems as intent as ever to eat feathers after weeks of jail time.

 

[Lacy Blues]

What kind of chickens are these?

They look like production Rhode Island Reds.

 

[Lacy Blues]

Lacy, thanks for pointing that out about other nutrients. I grow a lot of carrots and squash in summer to store over winter to feed to the chickens, so they should be getting plenty of Vitamin C in these fresh veggies. As for sun, they do get a lot of sunlight through the translucent pen roof side panels. They take sun baths all winter long.

Flo's poops look as normal as the others'. I do pay attention to that every morning when cleaning the coops. Hers are robust and classic brown with a nice white dollop.

I do believe she has a unique problem absorbing nutrients, though. It would account for her being under-sized until she started on Forco, after which she went through a noticeable growth spurt.

If the feather eating is an habitual thing, I was hoping she could be discouraged by being in jail. But she seems as intent as ever to eat feathers after weeks of jail time.

One of the things I've been trying, in feeding the bacteria is when I eat an orange, I gather ALL of the white pulp under the skin of the orange that I am going to eat. I even peel it off the back of the skin. I chop it up and put it in their food. There is a LOT of pectin in this and the birds seem to love it. There is lots of Vit C in it too. As I pointed out, there is no Vit D given off in the winter sun so no amount of sunbathing is going to help. How about dark leafy greens? There's lots of Vit A in those that will help her out too. Have you tried hanging a cabbage or head of lettuce to give her something else to PICK at?

 

[azygous]

Yes, I hang cabbages throughout the winter. During summer, they get chard and spinach I grow.

I'll try to find more sources of Vitamins C and D, though. These chickens are better nourished than I am as it is. They're slowly coming back on line with egg laying, which surprises me since they barely get ten hours of daylight. Six out of the fourteen are laying. Doesn't that indicate good diet?

 

[southerndesert]

We seem to very rarely get the feather picking going on and our coops, runs, and property is always littered with shed feathers not eaten by our hens. We average 60 birds give or take all the time rotating at 3 years or so, feed pellets, some scratch with sunflower seeds now and then (not daily) free range from mid day on. Don't really do "treats" but scraps are fed from time to time as well as old bread.

I am not saying we have never seen this issue in 50 plus years working with chickens, but we have always removed the offending bird at once as this can be a learned habit.

I have learned from family before us that taught me many of my chicken keeping ways also keeping a yard full of layers that it was best to cull and eliminate the issue before it grew in their flocks.

Our chickens are not pets and I fully understand those that will not "cull" since they think of their hens as pets or even family, but looking for other solutions can often lead to widespread feather pulling which we have also learned slows egg production due to the stress of being plucked by your coop mates. I would at least isolate the offending hens to avoid others learning this nasty habit.

Just my 2 cents....

 

[Pullet Surprise]

With grim disappointment, I must report that Flo has relapsed back into her frenzied, compulsive feather-picking ways.

It's been building up for the past several days so I put her in chicken jail this afternoon after the flock had spent a few hours free-ranging. I returned later to check on Flo, and there she was, wandering freely with the others in the main part of the pen. She had figured out how to escape. I returned her to the "jail" enclosure and sat down to watch how she did it. She jumped up onto the perch, and flexed her knees several times, then made a giant leap over the fence.

While I was fixing the fence to make it escape-proof, I saw Flo racing around from one hen to the next, relieving them of feathers. I haven't seen Flo in such a feather-picking frenzy since before I tried Forco on the flock for the first time. She was like a tractor mower, shaving feathers from one end of the pen to the other.

This is after I trimmed her beak back to the quick, and hand-feeding her Forco ration to her each day to make sure she got her share.

I have no clue what has caused this current relapse. Perhaps it's the stress from starting to lay again after fall molt. But she's been laying for about two weeks now. She's definitely more hyper than usual. I'm hoping this is temporary, like her other relapses, and Flo will calm down again and lose her sudden interest in eating feathers.

I went a different route with Bridget the Shark. I have all my birds on FF and bit the bullet and let them free range. Bridget has stopped picking. I think with her it was as much about being bored as it was dietary.

 

[azygous]

This is why feather-picking is such an aggravating problem - so many different causes. There isn't one-size-fits-all simple, easy fix. Except for yanking the culprit out of the flock and putting her neck on the chopping block.

After chasing Flo down after seeing her snatch someone's neck feather, I hold her in my arms, she looks up into my eyes, and goes, "Caw, caw, caw," which translated means, "what I do is infuriating, annoying, and drives you bananas, but look at this innocent little face and try to convince yourself you could kill me".

Ah, what we do for love. Sigh.

 

[Cynthia12]

We seem to very rarely get the feather picking going on and our coops, runs, and property is always littered with shed feathers not eaten by our hens. We average 60 birds give or take all the time rotating at 3 years or so, feed pellets, some scratch with sunflower seeds now and then (not daily) free range from mid day on. Don't really do "treats" but scraps are fed from time to time as well as old bread.

I am not saying we have never seen this issue in 50 plus years working with chickens, but we have always removed the offending bird at once as this can be a learned habit.

I have learned from family before us that taught me many of my chicken keeping ways also keeping a yard full of layers that it was best to cull and eliminate the issue before it grew in their flocks.

Our chickens are not pets and I fully understand those that will not "cull" since they think of their hens as pets or even family, but looking for other solutions can often lead to widespread feather pulling which we have also learned slows egg production due to the stress of being plucked by your coop mates. I would at least isolate the offending hens to avoid others learning this nasty habit.

Just my 2 cents....

 

[equius]

Kandrews, I take an oz. every day, I think it help a lot. I occasionally whinny or cluck but is seems like a small price to pay.