Feather pecking in laying hens

Publishing video recordings of carefully crafted pecking studies

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Sarah Struthers has just received a BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) responsive mode grant, enabling her to build on her work she did as a PhD student at Roslin. In her PhD thesis, she examines the phenomenon of feather pecking in laying hens, using – amongst other tools – purpose-build pecking robots.

A little bit of background: When laying hens reach sexual maturity, they display different pecking behaviours, including severe feather pecking. This involves grabbing and pulling feathers off other hens and can lead to injury, cannibalism and death.

Severe feather pecking is a serious welfare concern. At the same time, it is an incredibly complex behavioural trait, which is difficult to address in isolation. Currently the main method for preventing the damage done by feather pecking is beak treatment. After hatching, the chick’s beak tip is exposed to infrared light, modifying the beak tissue so the beaks grow more blunted.

With growing pressure to move away from infrared beak treatment, researchers are looking for other methods to reduce the harm of feather pecking. Possible measures included enriching the environments or breeding hens who display less severe feather pecking. Another solution could be to genetically select birds who have blunter beaks over birds with sharper beaks. Before doing this, it is necessary to establish whether blunter beaks lead to less damage – one of the key questions in Sarah’s PhD.

Picture of Sarah Struthers

Sarah Struthers is a PhD student (soon to be postdoctoral researcher) at Roslin.

Her thesis consisted of several steps.

  • To start, Sarah assessed the beaks of hens from two different genetic lines, using geometric morphometrics (the analysis of shape). She used landmarks to characterise different beak shapes, building a framework for her future studies.
  • Next, Sarah ran two “pecking trials” to test how different beak shapes affect the damage done by pecking behaviours. In the first pecking trial, Sarah analysed the pecking behaviour of 12 laying hens with sharp beaks and 12 hens with blunt beaks. The hens were pecking a chicken model (a foam block covered with feathered skin) so no live birds were harmed. This first pecking trial showed that sharp beaks caused more damage than blunt beaks (e.g. they removed more feathers, and had more pecks that resulted in feather or tissue loss).
  • In the second pecking trial, Sarah collaborated with the School of Engineering to build a pecking robot. The robot could simulate hens’ natural pecking motion. Heads of hens with different beak shapes were attached to the robot. They then pecked into a soft gel, a proxy for muscle, at different programmed forces. Sarah used the gel indentations to quantify damage done by different beak shapes and pecking forces. This pecking trial suggested that more factors – not just beak sharpness – may also play a role in causing damage (e.g. other beak shape traits, behavioural motivation).



Insights into DataShare

The two pecking trials were filmed and published on DataShare, the University of Edinburgh’s free data repository.


Sarah chose DataShare as she wanted to share her original data so it can be found and reused by other researchers. It is a way to maximise visibility and impact, whilst keeping the data safe and supporting the idea of open science.


The Research Data Support team helped her with the upload, to optimise the documentation and findability of her work. “The contact I was working with was great. They responded very quickly, checking over what I had sent and gave me a list of things that I still had to do”. Overall, Sarah found the process very straightforward and not very time-consuming.

DataShare More on DataShare View Sarah's hen videos



DataStore offers many advantages

For storing her active research data, including images and R code, Sarah used DataStore. “DataStore had some advantages compared to OneDrive. With DataStore, I knew all my data was backed up, and I could share everything with my supervisor and my lab group through the shared group space”. Other advantages of DataStore compared to OneDrive are that DataStore makes daily tape backups stored off-site, it can support very large datasets (>1 PB), and it can connect to other services like DataSync (a file sharing service).

More on DataStore


With the BBSCR grant, Sarah will continue working with Dr Jeff Schoenebeck at Roslin as a postdoctoral researcher. Starting in September, she will be looking at beak shape from a developmental biology point of view, to better understand how beak shape and its variation is determined pre-hatch.


This case study was written by Dr Sarah Janac, Research Facilitator for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.


Citation

Struthers, Sarah. (2023). Using naturally-occurring variation in beak morphology to reduce feather pecking damage in laying hens, [moving image]. University of Edinburgh. The Roslin Institute. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/3838.

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