Chicken foraging behavior: Nature versus nurture

In our quest for good foraging chicken breeds, I started to wonder --- is foraging ability in chickens learned or is it innate?  The answer seems to be a little bit of both.

Pecking is an innate chicken behavior.  In one study, scientists placed a window in a developing chicken egg so that they could study the chick's behavior in the shell.  The chicks pecked even before they hatched, clearly proving that pecking is ingrained in their genetics.

While pecking is innate, foraging is learned.  You can see chickens learning to forage when you give day old chicks their first food dish.  It may take a few minutes for the chickens to discover the food, but when one bird finds it, all of the rest soon follow.  So I continue to think that it's important to get our broilers out on pasture ASAP so that they can learn more foraging behavior.

Even if you don't plan to raise your chickens in a forest pasture, it's useful to understand the root of pecking behavior.  Chickens in wild conditions spent up to 90% of their time foraging, which equated to 15,000 pecks per day.  When placed in a confined space with high quality food that is consumed in a matter of minutes, though, chickens often misplace their foraging behavior into pecking at each other.  The result --- called feather pecking --- can be bloody and disturbing.

We've discovered that our automatic chicken waterer solves this problem since it gives chickens something to peck at other than their neighbors.  We also like to scatter our feed on the ground to give our chickens more foraging time, and to raise them in chicken tractors where plenty of plants and bugs are present for supplemental food.  Giving your chickens a more positive outlet for their pecking behavior seems to work well at preventing feather pecking in even a confined flock.