Toys for Chickens to Reduce Pecking and Stress

It is very important to keep your chickens entertained, because, well, bored chickens can become all out blood-thirsty maniacs.  I mean it.

For chickens, the best entertainment is pecking any and everything around them, including each other.  Chicken on chicken violence really isn’t pretty and needs to be managed to reduce risk of injury.  And injuries can lead to death!  Emotional attachments aside, if one of our hens died prematurely we’d be losing a fairly significant investment.  We had to feed them for about 4-6 months before they started actually laying eggs, and 4-6 months of chicken feed isn’t cheap.

And even if a chicken doesn’t get ruthlessly murdered by its companions, all that pecking can be stressful, and a stressed out chicken isn’t a healthy chicken, and an unhealthy chicken doesn’t lay as well as a healthy chicken.  Thus happy chickens = plentiful fried egg breakfasts.

So the solution is obvious, they just need something more interesting to peck than each other.  Read on for some of our best ideas.