Back in November, one hen and a rooster apparently pecked a lot of feathers out of the back of the third hen in the flock. We noticed this when we went to feed them one day and there were feathers all over the place and the poor chicken had a bald spot.
So we went looking online for information about what to do and also asked in the backyard chicken groups we belong to on Facebook. The number one answer seemed to be to try giving them more protein.
So, we ordered this Hentastic Protein Bar from Amazon.com.
As you can see, it’s not very big, fitting into nour hand pretty easily. But, we broke it in half and gave half to the three chickens with the pecking problem. They gobbled it up immediately.
We gave the other half to our three silkie chickens. They didn’t have a problem with pecking but we figured they might need protein too. For the silkies, however, we crumbled up the protein bar into small pieces because the silkies are smaller and that made it easier for them to peck at.
About two months later, we repeated the process with another Hentastic Bar.
And the result, we’re happy to say, is that we haven’t had anymore incidents of feather pecking! We’re pretty sure the bar helped do the trick and we’ll probably continue to give it to them every two months or so.