When chickens are cramped into hellish conditions especially in battery cages where most eggs are produced, they get very stressed and often do much damage to each other like:
- Pecking each other and damaging their bodies.
- Eating their own eggs
- Killing and eating each other (cannibalism)
- Fighting for more space
- Bullying
Farmers lose money on damaged chickens and eggs, so they limit the damage by “debeaking” that is cutting off the tips of their beaks so the birds can’t harm each other so much. This isn’t always done right and the birds can lose the ability to eat. Debeaking is done in many ways. The simplest is to cut the beaks with hand tools that can be as basic as what we use to clip our own nails. Sometimes red hot knives are used. The larger, more mechanized farms use special machines. Click below for a “How to” demo.
How to use a beak cutting machine