Avoiding Excessive Growth of Claws in Caged Laying Hens

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Abstract
A method to avoid excessive growth and breakage of claws, especially observed in caged White Leghorn layers, was developed and studied in three consecutive trials. Such growth may cause accidents by birds getting trapped in parts of the cage. The sharpness of untrimmed claws may also cause injuries among hens as well as scratching handlers' wrists, for example, when the birds are loaded into crates for transport and slaughter. An 8 mm wide strip of abrasive tape was put onto the manure deflector (egg guard) on the feed trough facing inwards the cage (48×40 cm with 1×2″ welded wire floors). Each cage housed 4 hens. The total number of birds was 672 per trial with 336 birds per treatment, NT-birds (in non-tape cages) and T-birds (in cages with tape). Each trial comprised 15 periods of 28 days from 22–82 weeks of age. Egg production, egg weight, live weight, mortality, frequency of cracked and dirty eggs, egg rolling-out efficiency and the condition of plumage, neck front skin, foot and claws were registered. Individual scoring of exteriors was carried out at four different ages in each experiment. In all three experiments T-birds had highly significantly shorter claws than the NT-birds on each scoring occasion. The length of claws among the former did not exceed the length of claws in pullets (16–18 weeks of age) or in birds kept on litter floors, while a considerable number of the NT-birds had broken front claws or claws that were very long and often twisted. The T-birds were easier to handle when taken out of the cages and when loading into crates for slaughter. The durability and adhesive properties of the tape were found acceptable for at least three normal consecutive laying cycles. Apart from length of claws, no consistently reproduced significant difference in the three experiments was found in either of the traits studied. In Expt. 2, production as kg of eggs per started hen was significantly higher in T-hens. There was a tendency for slightly lower frequency of dirty eggs and inferior egg rolling-out efficiency in the T-cages. If introduced in practice, possible interaction effects between the design of the tape (measures and material), cage floor mesh size and strain of birds should be considered.