Keeping Your Chickens Stress Free
Stress can literally kill a chicken. There are different stressors that can affect your hens. Crowded coops are one leading cause of early poultry death. If you house twelve birds in a coop built for four, you are asking for trouble. The birds could turn on each other and kill the stressed hens.
Locating your coop next to the pen where you keep your pit bulls who are constantly snarling at the birds could stress them to the point of death. Yes, this happened to a friend of ours.
Not providing a perch for them to roost on at night can cause them stress. The chickens’ natural instinct is to get as high as they can off the ground. If there is no place for them to go, and a predator just walks by every night, unable to get in, your birds could die of the stress.
Too many roosters! Ideally, you should have one rooster for every six chickens. If the ratio tips the other way, the constant mating from different roosters may cause fights amongst the roosters and stress on the overly mated hens.
Predator attacks can stress them out. We had a coop that a raccoon tore the roof off of and got inside killing two hens. From that night on, the other chickens refused to go into that coop at night, even after the roof was repaired. We had to place them in the large coop.
A stress free chicken has better egg production, is happier and healthier. Make sure you do what you can to keep their stress down.
Happy relaxed small flock of hens & rooster