Injurious pecking — including feather pecking and vent pecking — causes severe welfare harm in laying hens. Understanding its causes and prevention is central to poultry welfare improvement.
Injurious pecking represents one of the most significant welfare harms in commercial laying hen production. Victims of feather pecking experience pain from wound damage and thermal stress from feather loss. Perpetrators are not inherently aggressive — pecking is a redirected natural behaviour driven by barren environments. The welfare-positive approach addresses root causes: providing adequate foraging substrate, reducing stocking density, improving lighting regimes, and ensuring nutritional adequacy. Beak trimming, while reducing mortality in some systems, causes acute and potentially chronic pain and should be viewed as a symptom of inadequate husbandry rather than a solution. Intact-beak systems require higher management standards but eliminate the welfare compromise of mutilation.