Keel bone fractures affect the majority of laying hens in commercial flocks and cause chronic pain — making their prevention one of the highest-priority welfare challenges in the egg industry worldwide.
Keel bone fractures represent the most prevalent welfare problem in laying hen production globally, yet they remain poorly understood by consumers and underaddressed by industry and regulators. The scale is staggering: if 50-80% of the approximately 8 billion laying hens globally have fractures at any given time, the aggregate pain burden is enormous. The pain is chronic — fractures that occur early in the laying period persist through months of production, with callus formation providing some healing but rarely complete resolution. The welfare failure is systemic: high-calcium demands of egg production weaken bones, perch designs cause traumatic landing forces, and production pressures maintain high bird numbers in systems where individual welfare monitoring is impossible. Solutions require a multi-pronged approach: breeding for keel bone robustness, improving perch design to reduce landing forces, providing exercise from early life to build bone strength, and ultimately accepting lower egg production rates that impose less calcium stress on the skeleton.