Severe Wound Care and Eradicating Cannibalism: An Educational Post

This is an educational post that explains how I was able to successfully eradicate cannibalism behaviors in my flock and heal a severe flesh wound in one of my hens. My reason for posting this is to hopefully help someone who finds themselves in a similar situation presently or years down the road.

Cannibalism is a very taboo topic in the chicken keeping world. If you mention cannibalism, one instantly thinks of the horrific husbandry conditions chickens are forced to endure in factory farming situations. And for good reason. You almost never hear about it in backyard flocks. Cannibalism, aside from the occasional peck wound, is one of those things that the average chicken keeper thinks would ever happen to them, until it does. I certainly found myself in a similar situation.

So what happened?

I am a backyard chicken keeper on the East Coast with 8 spoiled rotten hens. At the time of these events my year-old girls were living in a spacious run, roughly 18x6, with an attached coop, and access to everything they could possibly need: 20% layer feed, fresh clean water, grit/oyster-shell/eggshell, and plenty of enrichment (or so I thought). My girls were happy, and up to this point I had absolutely zero issues with bullying or cannibalism.

Everything changed this Winter with recording breaking temperatures. When I went to let the girls out one morning, I found my lavender Orpington covered in blood. I rushed her inside and cleaned her bum up so I could see what was going on. There was so much blood that I wasn’t even able to see a wound. Then I saw it — The most horrific flesh wound in a chicken I had ever seen in person. She had been severely pecked and left with a gaping hole on her backside.

⭐️ Wound care: As soon as I knew what was going on, I flushed the wound out with diluted iodine in a spray bottle. I applied plain triple antibiotic overtop to keep it moist to aid in healing. I isolated my hen in my shed in a little tent with access to food, regular water, and poultry cell enriched water. At this point she was in shock, so I kept it really calm and dark. Because she had lost so much blood, and it was so cold, I set up a safe heating plate on a thermostat outside of the tent to help her regulate her temperature a little better. She would end up being isolated for a month until she was fully healed. I repeated the wound care process 3x a day for the first couple days, then switched to twice a day with Vetericyn spray.

Going outside to check on the rest of my hens, I was severely disturbed. Almost all of my hens had blood on their heads/beaks so it was impossible to single out the perpetrator. Over the next couple of days, I began to notice strange changes in my flock. Several of my chickens began to lose feathers around their back and bums, the surrounding feathers broken into pieces. This very quickly escalated to bloody pecks on bare skin. The bloodied hens were treated/isolated if necessary, and returned to the flock. Soon enough, I was able to identify the perpetrator — my Rhode Island Red hen. After confirming my suspicions, she was removed from the flock and rehomed to a friend with a large flock and roosters.

Minor cannibalistic behaviors continued following the removal of the perpetrator.

⭐️ Here’s what I changed:

I fenced in a yard and allowed my girls to have supervised* free range time for no less than 2 hrs a day. This alone made a HUGE difference in my flock’s behavior. We’re working on making it safer for them to be left alone so they can get even more outside time. This more than doubled their living space. While my run is *technically* appropriately sized for the number of chickens I have, it has been incredibly beneficial to let me space themselves out more as well as engage in more natural behaviors like scratching and dust bathing.

*We live in an area with many predators. We do our best to make sure the girls can get outside everyday but we don’t feel super comfortable leaving them unsupervised. There are frequently loose cats and dogs that wander on our property as well as hawks/foxes/coyotes/raccoons

I added straw bales into their run. I have straw bales flipped up on their side to serve as hiding places as well as give them more places to perch. When they cannot be outside, I like to put a flake or two of straw in their run and let them dig through it. It’s extra fun if you hide bugs and other goodies in the straw. A busy chicken is a happy chicken.

I changed their feeders. To cover all of my bases, I started offering a days worth of feed into two separate rubber dishes on opposite sides of the run to ensure everyone was getting enough to eat. I stopped feeding treats for about a week to make sure they were not filling up on anything other than their feed.

I use Rooster Booster Pick-No-More coverup lotion. This is a safer alternative to Blu Kote that does not contain rubbing alcohol or gentian violet. This has been super helpful to have on hand to cover healed scabs/bare skin/pin feathers.

Fast forward to today, things are finally back to normal. I have a happy, healthy flock that are still growing back missing feathers lol. Do I know why this started in the first place? Not really, but I have my theories. Likely, it was a combination of things including weather related stress and OCD behaviors in my RIR.

I sincerely hope this post was able to educate/help anyone going through something similar in their flock. Don’t loose hope!