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Help please! I recently added 5 new POL to my brood. They've integrated into the main flock absolutely fine - which we considered ultra lucky with no real fighting occurring.

Horrors, the little devils are breaking eggs and eating them, so I'm running up and down the garden all day trying to bring in the eggs as they're laid.

My annoyance broke loose yesterday and I doused the blighters with the hose pipe in my hand as I caught them in the act in open air (one had been laid astray of the coop)!

How do I break them of this habit? Anyone any knowledge or prior experience? I'm wanting to avoid resigning them for the pot just yet ........

Help and comments most, most appreciated. Ta in advance!

oh lor! - never had the problem myself, but you could try the following -
make sure the nest boxes are really dark, and have bags of straw in them - remove the eggs as many times as possible during the day, and if you can find some, replace with solid porcelain ones (that'll give 'em a headache!)
It's a habit that can spread, so nip it in the bud - any hen caught in the act, or with egg round it's beak, whip it out, and isolate, prior to neck-stretching!
As a last resort, you could break an egg into a dish, and doctor with pepper/chile etc..........

Martin wrote:oh lor! - never had the problem myself, but you could try the following -
make sure the nest boxes are really dark, and have bags of straw in them - remove the eggs as many times as possible during the day, and if you can find some, replace with solid porcelain ones (that'll give 'em a headache!)
It's a habit that can spread, so nip it in the bud - any hen caught in the act, or with egg round it's beak, whip it out, and isolate, prior to neck-stretching!
As a last resort, you could break an egg into a dish, and doctor with pepper/chile etc..........

It is well worth, as Martin suggests, making the next boxes as dark as possible - I found making the entrance as small as possible very effective.

Otherwise, hang up some greens for them (nettles are good, or cabbage), make sure they are getting enough minerals (egg eating is sometimes due to a lack of calcium) and colloect eggs as often as you can.

As a last resort eat the guilty.

Hmmmm, mum suggested we put the 'fake' eggs in - though I considered that this might encourage them as sometimes they may get the fake and others the normal eggs?

I take on board the other suggestions, and particularly like the idea of giving them pepper and chilli - strange SOH that I have .....!

Really wanting to avoid necking them since we only just got the blighters, and the original owner is denying any such incidents happened when she had them .........

Will aim to put other options in place as suggested over the coming days ..

As an aside, if you can get them to eat red capiscums (sweet peppers) in quantity or paprika in their feed it dyes the yolks first orange and then red. I was told this, disbelieved it, then had a surfit of peppers one year that went a bit soft si I tossed a (big) pile to the hens one day. They fell on them like a wolf unto the fold, and two days later, much to my surprise, orange and almost red yolks.

So blueberries fed to the hens ... ? Oh, scrummy yummy.

We had a couple of hens eating eggs last year, and they taught it to the others. I put a golf ball in the nest, and increased their feed. They pretty much stopped now.

I still see egg yolk on them occasionally, but I think they are only eating broken eggs - ones from the older hens with thinner shells.

I have one old hen who still lays very brittle shelled eggs and she and the others just devour that egg, but leave the healthy egg of the young hen alone.

Thankfully!