GAINESVILLE, Ga. — At this year’s Georgia Layer Conference, Janice Siegford gave a presentation on the behaviors and welfare of cage-free hens. Siegford is an associate professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Animal Science.
According to the university, Siegford is an applied ethologist who uses a combination of non-invasive approaches to study the behavior of laying hens in production systems with the goal of improving their welfare.
She opened her presentation at the conference with a question for the audience: what are people’s goals for cage-free housing and are everyone’s goals the same?
The answer is simple: the main goal is to improve animal welfare. However, each industry stakeholder may have other goals in mind for cage-free housing, such as government regulations or meeting consumer demands.
Every cage-free system is different and can vary in size, appearance, and style. However, in these systems, hens can be packed together very densely, which can lead to problems in the various stages of laying.
“They show problems like feather loss, and, as they age in these systems, there can be different things that appear like keel bone damage, and the hens can experience layer fatigue and things of that nature,” Siegford noted.
The big push for a change in hen housing came from public concern about hen living conditions. In fact, one common consumer misconception that Siegford pointed out about cage-free housing in the U.S. is that the “cage-free” label implies outdoor access, but that isn’t true.
As an ethologist, Siegford tries to understand all of the ins and outs of hen behavior so that the industry can have an easier time managing these behaviors and meeting their needs and wants, which will lead to reduced stress in hens and an improved egg product.
Before diving deeper into hen behavior in cage-free systems, Siegford explained that domestic chickens originate from red junglefowl in Southeast Asia, and they still exhibit some of the same behaviors as their ancestors.
Behaviors are simply an external expression of a hen’s internal state, whether that be their emotional or physical state. Additionally, hen behavior can change in response to a health event. They can start to show behaviors that can help facilitate recovery.
Siegford brought this all back to cage-free systems by asking two questions:
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- Can hens actually do all of their natural behaviors in cage-free systems?
- And can they do them in a way that means good welfare?
Hens are motivated to perch, and it does have some physiological benefits to it like improved leg strength. However, including perches in a hen house raises questions.
Producers must consider the size, diameter, shape, height, and material of perches when putting them into hen houses.
According to Siegford, the proper recommendations for perches include:
- Six inches of perch space per hen
- At least 20 percent of perches should be inches or more above the litter floor
- Hens must be able to wrap their toes around the perch.
However, a study shows that these recommendations may not be realistic for actual hens. In that study, it was found that the four strains of hens used in the study were wider than six inches when perching.
That same study showed that different kinds of hens prefer different kinds of perches. For example, white-feathered hens preferred the highest tier of perch while brown-feathered hens perched uniformly on every level of perch.
Also, pullets preferred roosting on platforms compared to perches, prioritizing stability over grasping. In fact, all birds preferred high platforms when they are the highest surface in the pen.
In addition to perches, producers must consider nest space.
“Nest space is always a critical thing to consider, because…from a producer and an industry standpoint, if we’re cage-free, we want to make sure we get lots of eggs and we get them all in the nest because that makes the system most efficient and results in the most sellable product,” Siegford explained.
The recommended size for nest space is 9 to 10 square feet per 100 hens, Siegford noted, but that is not enough space. With this sizing, there would only be 0.09 to 0.1 square feet of space for each hen, but hens occupy between 0.6 to 0.7 square feet when sitting. That is almost three times the recommended space.
If there isn’t enough nesting space for hens to lay eggs, hens will still lay eggs, just not in the nests where they are easily accessible for producers to collect them.
Limited hen space can also be a problem when hens are tightly synchronized. It turns out that different hens prefer to lay at different times of the day, but sometimes the timing can overlap.
A study found that brown hens predominantly lay in the morning, while white hens will lay throughout the day, so there is a window of time when brown and white hens will be trying to lay at the same time. With this limited space, hens will resort to laying anywhere on the floor.
A third thing that producers must consider is cage-free litter area. It’s recommended that 15-33 percent of usable floor space should be litter area, Siegford shared, which would approximately be 0.18 to 0.27 square feet per hen.
However, when dustbathing, hens occupy between 1 to 1.3 square feet of space. So, once again, the recommendations for areas where hens can perform natural behaviors are not equivalent to the amount of space hens actually need.
Siegford continued her presentation by providing various definitions for animal welfare.
For scientists, welfare has three different meanings:
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- Welfare means that the animal is healthy and has what it wants.
- Welfare refers to the animal’s quality of life with respect to biological functionality, natural living, and affective state.
- Welfare is the state of the animal as it attempts to cope with its environment.
“The animal has to be functioning and feeling good in multiple ways, not just continuing to produce an egg, because we have so strongly selected laying hens to produce eggs,” Siegford noted. “They will virtually be on death’s door before they stop laying eggs. So… saying that this hen is producing [is] an indicator of good welfare is overly simplistic and actually doesn’t really reflect her entire biological reality.”
Different organizations have varied definitions of welfare:
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- World Organization of Animal Health: welfare is the physical and mental state of an animal in relation to the conditions in which it lives or dies
- American Veterinary Medical Association: an animal with good welfare is healthy, comfortable, well-nourished, safe, able to express innate behavior, and is not suffering from unpleasant states
With all of these definitions in mind, Siegford once again brought it back to cage-free housing with these questions:
- Are cage-free systems succeeding?
- Do the systems work as intended?
- What are the unintended consequences?
- Are all the things chickens do “good” behaviors, such as pecking and piling?
Like with most things, there are pros and cons to cage-free housing. The pros include increased social behavior and overall, more freedom for birds. The cons, on the other hand, include group density, mismatch of hens to the system design, harsh environment, and it’s harder to keep track of birds and problems in cage-free systems.
Although detecting and identifying bird behavior is important, Siegford explained that that isn’t always enough to understand welfare.
“Sometimes, what the problem might be is that we might be detecting one particular behavior but not necessarily seeing it in a bigger picture,” Siegford said. “Is the bird showing this behavior for a positive and natural reason, or is it actually a redirected behavior because the bird isn’t able to express something else?”
To better understand welfare, Siegford suggested that the industry use a baseline to compare bird behaviors to see if they are good/normal or bad/abnormal. Producers can compare the behaviors to red junglefowl, free-range birds, or birds in studies to better understand behaviors.
However, detecting bad behaviors or other problems doesn’t automatically ensure welfare improvement. Ideally, Siegford noted, a problem could be solved once identified, but that’s easier said than done. So many different things can cause bad behaviors that it is hard to find a solution for them.
Siegford ended her presentation by acknowledging that cage-free systems and welfare can be complicated. Producers must take so many different things into account to ensure hens are happy and healthy, but it is all worth it when hens are able to produce the best egg product possible.
To read more about this year’s Georgia Layer Conference, click here.
