Nutritional approaches to reduce or prevent feather pecking in laying hens: any potential to intervene during rearing?

Figures & data

Table 1. Prevalence of feather pecking (FP), severe feather pecking (SFP), gentle feather pecking (GFP) and plumage damage (PD) since 1999 of beak trimmed (Y), intact (N) and trimming unknown (U) flocks.

Study	Beak trimming	Country	Results	Reference
59 flocks	N	Sweden	PD: 62%	Gunnarsson et al. (1999)
32 aviary rearing flocks 34 deep litter rearing flocks	U	Switzerland	FP deep litter: 37.5% FP aviaries: 35.9%	Huber Eicher (1999)
214 farms	Y	United Kingdom	FP: 57%	Green et al. (2000)
198 farms	U	United Kingdom	FP: 33.3%	Potzsch et al. (2001)
25 flocks, starting at rearing	N	Switzerland	FP: 40% (week 5) FP: 77.3% (week 14) PD: 92.4% (week 50)	Huber Eicher and Sebo (2001)
Beak trimmed flocks and organic flocks	Y/N	The Netherlands	FP trimmed: 30–60% FP organic: 75%	Bestman (2002)
63 organic flocks	N	The Netherlands	PD moderate: 19% PD severe: 52%	Bestman and Wagenaar (2003)
Beak trimmed flocks	Y	Switzerland	PD: 30% with more than 50% damaged	Häne et al. (2007)
26 flocks within 4 different housing systems	Y/N	United Kingdom	PD: 15.5–26.9%	Sherwin et al. (2010)
61 free range and organic laying farms	Y/N	United Kingdom	GFP: 82.9% SFP: 85.6%	Lambton et al. (2010)
34 rearing flocks	Y	United Kingdom	GFP: 94% SFP: 27% (rearing) SFP: 65% (lay)	Gilani et al. (2013)
43 flocks, aviary	Y/N	Belgium	PD: 91.6% (tail)	Heerkens et al. (2015)
15 barn flocks19 organic flocks	Y/N	Denmark	PD: 22.2% (barn) PD: 7.4% (organic)	Riber and Hinrichsen (2016)
10 flocks beak trimmed, 10 flocks intact	Y/N	Denmark	PD trimmed: 6.7% PD intact:	Riber and Hinrichsen (2017)
15 laying farms	U	Australia	PD: 93.3%	Au and Singh (2018)
26 flocks, cage systems	Y	Canada	PD: 21.9%	Decina et al. (2019)
13 laying farms, cage systems	N	Denmark	PD: 69.4% (belly)	Rorvang et al. (2019)
79 flocks, cage systems80 flocks, free range	Y	France	SFP: 32.9% (cage)SFP: 23.8% (free range)	Coton et al. (2017)

Figure 1. Overview of possible causations of feather pecking and the factors that influence the causations. Arrows indicate influences. Striped arrows and striped dotted arrow show connections within a hypotheses. Causations highlighted in grey are mostly related to nutrition.

Figure 2. The time when 50% of the plateau level of TiO₂ excretion was reached (p < 0.05): FP = feather pecking, feathers = access to feathers, no feathers = no access to feathers. Adapted from Harlander-Matauschek et al. (2006).

Figure 3. Effect of lysine intake level (mg/hen/day) on mean cumulative feather score from 1 (completely featherless) to 4 (fully feathered) at five body areas: neck, back, vent, wings and breast, of laying hens fed different dietary lysine levels at 27 (black), 47 (striped) and 66 (dotted) weeks of age. Adapted from Kumar et al. (2018).

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