Mortality in laying hen flocks reflects welfare problems including feather pecking, infectious disease, and management failures, making mortality rate a key welfare indicator and target for improvement.
Laying hen mortality is both a welfare indicator and a welfare outcome: high mortality reflects welfare problems upstream (disease, injurious pecking, management failures) and represents welfare harm to the hens that die. The deaths associated with feather pecking and cannibalism are particularly concerning because they are preventable through appropriate enrichment, stocking density management, and stockperson training. Hens dying from cannibalism experience a prolonged, painful death that represents welfare failure at the individual and flock level. Keel bone fractures — which occur predominantly from collision with perch structures and affect the majority of laying hens across all housing systems — cause chronic pain that impairs movement and access to resources, contributing to welfare compromise throughout the production cycle. Farms monitoring weekly mortality rates and investigating spikes as the trigger for management intervention demonstrate the kind of proactive welfare management that prevents avoidable deaths. Welfare assessment protocols that include flock-level mortality benchmarking allow comparison against industry standards and identification of outlier farms requiring targeted improvement.