Feather pecking is a serious welfare and production problem in commercial laying hen flocks — causing injury to pecked birds and indicating chronic stress in pecking birds — with multiple contributing factors requiring integrated management.
Feather pecking creates a cycle of welfare harm: pecked birds suffer pain, stress, and thermal regulation problems from feather loss; pecking birds may be expressing chronic stress through redirected foraging behavior in an inappropriate context. The response — beak trimming — causes acute pain during the procedure and may cause chronic phantom pain in the remaining nerve-rich tissue. The welfare-appropriate response to feather pecking is prevention through addressing the environmental and management causes: providing adequate foraging substrate, appropriate stocking density, correct lighting intensity and duration, and dietary optimization. Successful intact-beak flocks demonstrate that these management approaches can work at commercial scale, eliminating both the welfare harm of pecking and the welfare harm of beak treatment.