30 Apr Sat 2016
Chicken Cages higher not deeper
An interesting study, done for battery caged layers, shows that when you buy one of your cages for transporting or showing or housing often injures the birds when you get them too deep. Instead the recommendation is to get them as shallow as possible. The reason seems to be that the shallower they are, the easier for the bird to get to the food trough and so presumably eat more. Since they are in caged because of environmental _stress_ of one type another, a fall off in their eating could be more harmful than helpful particularly as they have small gullets and systems and shock could cause a heart attack.
To be honest, I was scouting for something like as I have bought several types of cages in the past, some wire dog cages, other chicken oriented ones and I found that the very deep cages were problematic because if you put more than 2 cockerels in one, they will fight -- but if I used a higher but narrower one they didn't. I was wondering if this was just peculiar to my Ameraucanas or a general trend, but overall listening to the boys helped alleviate those problems.
Other findings are:
- When the battery cages 460 mm in depth (deep) were compared with 305 mm cages (shallow); the two shapes provided equal areas per bird but the 305mm was better.
- More eggs were produced per hen housed from 30 to 70 weeks in the shallow cages; this difference is significant.
- The pattern of feeding activity over the day was significantly more in the shallow cages; this pattern accords more closely with physiological requirements.
- Feather damage caused by pecking was slightly higher, but it became significantly more severe in the deep cages over a long period of time (70 weeks.)
- The proportion of cracked eggs (collected from 60 to 70 weeks) was significantly lower in shallow cages.
- In the shallow cages a higher proportion of birds was present in the front half; with the back almost being totally empty.
- It is suggested that some of the advantages conferred by the shallow cage may be related to the greater accessibility of the food trough.