Cannibalism involves the pecking and tearing of skin and underlying tissues of another bird. It is a serious welfare problem in egg laying stains of domestic fowl. This study assessed the pecking behaviour of caged White Leghorn hens towards feather-shaped stimuli varying in colour (red or blue), material (paper or feather) and movement (stationary or movable) attached to a board placed in the feed trough. Each of the eight stimulus combinations was presented to two replicate groups of 5 young hens for 15 min at 45 and 57 days of age. Severe pecks were directed more frequently at feathers than paper stimuli and at movable than stationary stimuli but there was no differential response to red and blue stimuli. When reassessed the responses to the stimuli in groups of four hens at 696 and 710 days of age the study found no significant effects of colour, material or movement on the latency to peck the stimuli, or the frequency of gentle and severe pecks at the stimuli. There was a positive correlation between the frequency of severe feather pecking at flock mates and the frequency of cannibalistic behaviour. This study did not find significant correlation between the frequency of pecking at the inanimate stimuli and the frequencies of pecking at the flesh and feathers of flock mates. In summary it is concluded that the frequency of pecking at inanimate stimuli was not a good predictor of future cannibalistic behaviour by hens in this study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cannibalism involves the pecking and tearing of skin and underlying tissues of another bird. It is a serious welfare problem in egg laying stains of domestic fowl. This study assessed the pecking behaviour of caged White Leghorn hens towards feather-shaped stimuli varying in colour (red or blue), material (paper or feather) and movement (stationary or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[928],"tags":[2126,8882,13816,19216,2854,5162,5725,18276,8533,23694,17077,135,6904,46,20007,133,9053,27247,13330,10859,17067,15459,16262,20911,27281,25250],"class_list":["post-4993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-welfare","tag-agebehaviourcannibalismchickencolour-preferencefeather-peckinggrouphenhenslaying-henspeckingresponsesocial-behaviourwelfare","tag-al","tag-ass","tag-assess","tag-bin","tag-boar","tag-board","tag-cannibalism","tag-chicken-colour-preference","tag-dir","tag-does-pecking-at-inanimate-stimuli-predicts-cannibalistic-behaviour-in","tag-egg","tag-fee","tag-feed","tag-gh","tag-hens","tag-leg","tag-list","tag-lou","tag-nat","tag-pecking-at-inanimate-stimuli-predicts-cannibalistic-behaviour-in-domestic-fowl","tag-ped","tag-pl","tag-t","tag-welfare","tag-what-is-cannibalistic-behaviour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}