Inbred quail?

[Dman34]

I've seen a lot of recent posts about people having aggressive quail that attack each other for no apparent reason (ie not males attacking males for dominance). I've had quite a few aggressive jumbo quail myself and one of my males recently pecked out a female's eye. As soon as I found the injured female and took her out of the cage, he started attacking the other females in the cage non-stop. He wasn't trying to mate, he was going for their eyes. I also had 4 or 5 females doing that same thing starting from 3 weeks old.

My quail are in stacking cages with four tiers, there's 4F / 1M each tier and there's about 1.5 sq ft per bird. They have constant access to food and water. Their feed is 28% turkey mash. I started with 100 eggs that I got from Ebay. I slowly narrowed down which birds I would keep as breeders by size and aggression. My quail are 9 weeks old right now and I thought I had culled all the aggressive ones... My philosophy was that it doesn't matter how big a bird is if it's stressing out all other ones in the cage and preventing them from laying or mating.

I know jumbo quail were already selectively bred for their size for centuries, not sure if that contributes to their aggression. I'm just wondering if these people selling eggs on Ebay are inbreeding their quail. It's just hard to imagine that quail with good genetics would be so psycho...

 

[blackoaktammy]

What kind of quail? Bobwhite or Coturnix?

 

[Dman34]

What kind of quail? Bobwhite or Coturnix?

Jumbo brown coturnix.

 

[Kiki]

Can you post a picture of your cage set up?

 

[Dman34]

I built my cage exactly like this one:

I also have a feeder on each side of the cage in the front and four water cups that span the length of the back of the cage. They have constant access to clean water, high protein feed and a calcium supplement on the side.

I've been checking on them every day to make sure they're not fighting. Two weeks went by with no fighting. But then, within a day, a hen pecked out the eyes of all the other birds in her cage... I tried everything to get them to stop fighting: More room, less room, I clean the poop trays biweekly and sprayed them with water when they got aggressive.

Please, no more questions, just answers as to how I can get them to stop fighting. I'm culling all these stupid fking birds if they don't stop fighting.

 

[Kiki]

Do you have anything inside the cage that they can hide and get away from each other in/under?

 

[Dman34]

Ok, I'm killing all of them tonight.

 

[Nabiki]

People are asking questions in order to give you a better answer. Would you go to a tech and say, "My computer won't turn on!" and expect a tech to fix it without seeing it or asking any questions? Yes, the tech could overwhelm you with a dozen or more possibilities, but it's better to get an accurate description and idea of what the problem is in order to give a relevant answer.

 

[Kiki]

Ok, I'm killing all of them tonight.

I cooked some a few weeks ago like this.
I recommend trying it.
https://www.goodfoodstories.com/ask-casey-quail/