please help! one of my chicks is being picked on and is bleeding

[obe10]

yup good luck with your chicks

 

[lalaland]

if your leghorn is a picker, you might not be able to stop her - I just went through this with 8 week old pullets.

Picking is supposedly caused by too little room, too much light, too much stress, too much boredom, too little protein. So whatever you can do to give your pullets more room, a calm environment (no dogs chasing or kids chasing, etc) would be good. If you are using a heat lamp, put in a red bulb, or try not to use light at night.

The head of lettuce is a great idea, as is putting sod or weeds into the run, cabbage, apples - you might need to halve the apples until they learn to peck at them - toss some dry cat food into the run, black oil sunflower seeds, watermelon rinds, corn cobs either raw or your leftover cob after youve had dinner.

If you can make your run have places to hide or get out of sight ( a hay bale for example, or a deck chair, or a dog kennel, or....) with food and water in more than one place, that can help too.

If you dont have a roost in your run, consider putting one in. Even a sawhorse can work. gives them something to do )playing king of the mountain)

consider separating out your leghorn and keeping her separate for a day or two - sometimes this changes the pecking order.

bruze23, while the general idea is to keep the pullets separate from the big girls until they are about the same size, Ive had good luck by letting them see each other for a couple of weeks before mingling them - if you can keep them in the same coop, but tack up some chicken wire to separate them - that works well, as does a chicken wire fence inside the run to keep them separate. I usually throw treats right by the wire, so both sets of chickens are eating away very close to each other, just separated by the fence. You can monitor how much the older hens are trying to peck on the little ones through the fence, and when there is little agression shown, you can try re-introducing them.

good luck,
and keep us updated on how your chick is doing