Debeaking Poultry

With the expanding amount of information on the internet comes the decision for readers to choose what to believe. This blog entry is going to be about debeaking poultry, which is most commonly done with chickens or turkeys. When a person types in debeaking chickens in a google search about half of them come up that debeaking is negative; however these are also all opinion biases. Not even half the sites explain what debeaking is and the ones that want to give it a bad rap do not understand the process. Well, what is debeaking you may, ask and why is it done?

 

 Which do you prefer?

 

 

Debeaking is removing the end third of the beak of poultry. Yes only 1/3 is removed and it is done at a day of age for the infrared process and 7 days for the hot blade method. It is done at this young age because the bird’s beak is not very hard yet so it is not painful to them. It is often compared to clipping a person’s fingernail. Now while this information is actually correct many people who just go on blogs may find information that is totally a person’s belief. Having raised chickens for 15 years and competing in different national contests I hate when the public is misinformed about my industry.

The goal of farmers and ranchers is to take care of their animals and it is really frustrating for me to find people that post comments that have no background. One blog compared debeaking to, “chopping off the hand of a bully who you know is being abused at home.” A little later in the blog the author goes on to blame debeaking as the reason her pullets (female chicken under one year of age) were not laying eggs because they were so traumatized. This is most definitely not the case. The authors birds are most likely not mature enough to lay eggs or have the wrong environmental factors whether that is temperature or a really common problem amount of light.  

Debeaking is a common practice for larger operations as well as small family flocks that don’t want to deal with pecking. Birds are carnivorous and I have definitely witnessed this first hand. If they are not given enough space, proper ventilation, or the right amount of nutrients in their feed it can get to be a problem really fast. Chickens are attracted to the color red and once they have tasted the blood they just want more and it is a really hard problem to fix. For large producers it is better to just have the birds beaks trimmed so they do not have to worry about this problem. It could turn into a disaster really fast with lots of causalities if it was not noticed right away, so beak trimming is a great preventative measure.

With my own birds we have ordered them with and without their beaks trimmed and there have been no differences. Having grown at least 20 different breeds of chickens I have had different experiences with beaks. In the past I have had problems with some birds beaks growing too fast and they would start to cross funny. This could have been prevented had they been debeaked as a chick. Another breed I have worked with for at least a decade is the Brown Leghorn. Leghorns in general are a very flighty high energy breed so they are one of the most common breeds for cannibalism. This is also why major egg producers have their birds’ debeaked. Space is also a limitation for large producers.      

If you want more information this link explains the process of beak trimming in an easily understandable way.  http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/36022000/Beak%20Trimming%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf