Couple of questions?

[shadegrow]

First question is does anyone have experience of introducing fully beaked birds in with de-beaked ones? Do they gain the upper hand (or beak) as they come fully equipped so to speak.
Second apart from grass our girls will not touch greens. We have tried lettuce, cabbage, comfrey, sweet corn not green I know but you get the gist I hope.
Is there any can't fail veggie they will like?

[Suechooks]

Not sure about the first Q but you could try giving them Chard. Mine would sell their souls for Chard or spinach.

[Bramble-Poultry]

i have mixed beaked and debeaked ex-batts together and no harm has come from it. the only reason they debeak the birds is to stop them getting a tight grip on feathers and fether plcking their neighbours

i would therefore assume that if there was a task where they needed a tight grip on something, then th ebeaked ones would be in a better position but in my experience they cope just as well as all the rest

[julesapple]

Debeaking sound awful...poor girlies. Do the beaks grow back?

Jules

[di]

Dandelion & Marigold weren't(and still aren't)debeaked,whereas our Isa's are.They've always been at the bottom of the pecking order.(The Isa's are more in numbers & were there first,I think that has more to do with it.)
The only chook to have ever drawn blood(just had to be a friends little girl,after I'd assured her feeding them corn from your hand doesn't hurt!),was one of the debeaked ones and our most gentle pecker is Marigold(beaked),even when she was stressed about having her vent feathers cleaned,her peck was just a gentle "get off" type thing.
So after the waffle,I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference,just like BP says,it stops them getting a firm grip on neighbouring birds feathers.
How have you been giving them greens?Although they've got the hang of eating leaves thrown in for them now,initially they preferred them to be hung up to peck at.(Marigold is still lazy & prefers you to hold hers!)

[Bramble-Poultry]

Nope - and I won;t tell you the process they use for de-beaking either Jules (BTW - you feeling better?)

[bluemoon]

When we bought our Marans we had a good look around at all the chap's breeds, just to make sure he didn't have something we liked better and all the ones he'd bred himself had beaks and all his bought in hybrids had had them removed before he took delivery. I can understand why they do it for hens intended for battery farms, but these were Bluebelles, Amber Stars and the like and were presumably intended for domestic keepers. They looked decidedly odd and it seems strange that the producers seem to do it as a matter of course..

[walldanzig]

I think it's shocking debeaking birds they are not intended to be that way so why would anyone do it

[Hilary B]

Debeaking is definitely on the list of 'unacceptable'. The idea is to reduce the ability to harm the others in an over-crowded barn. Only the tip of the upper part of the beak is removed (in case anyone thought it was more drastic, that's bad enough!) but it used to be said that debeaked birds might find pellets more difficult, and should be fed 'meal' (this was in one of my books 20 odd years ago).

I suppose some 'domestic' poultry keepers make the mistake of only giving as much space as the DEFRA rules demand (although it is to be hoped they soon realise this won't do) and under those conditions, aggression is all too likely!

[bluemoon]

Hilary the ones we saw did have just the front part of the upper beak removed, but it was at least half of it and I would imagine that feeding would have been difficult unless they used the lower beak spoon-like. One book I read said that a bird which had been treated this way would grow the beak back within 6 weeks, but I've since spoken to someone who had three debeaked hybrids and she says that the beaks never even began to regrow and the oldest was 4 when she died. I don't even believe it would help much with an aggressive bird in any situation other than a battery cage as mine tend to fly at each other with claws out, cockerel style, I've never seen them peck at each other. Having said that, when they do the cock-fight thing they rarely make contact, I think it's all show so if they meant to harm the other bird they might indeed peck. As you say though, debeaking is definitely one for the unacceptable list.

[Hilary B]

Hilary the ones we saw did have just the front part of the upper beak removed, but it was at least half of it and I would imagine that feeding would have been difficult unless they used the lower beak spoon-like. One book I read said that a bird which had been treated this way would grow the beak back within 6 weeks, but I've since spoken to someone who had three debeaked hybrids and she says that the beaks never even began to regrow and the oldest was 4 when she died. I don't even believe it would help much with an aggressive bird in any situation other than a battery cage as mine tend to fly at each other with claws out, cockerel style, I've never seen them peck at each other. Having said that, when they do the cock-fight thing they rarely make contact, I think it's all show so if they meant to harm the other bird they might indeed peck. As you say though, debeaking is definitely one for the unacceptable list.

Those who see the operation as 'sometimes acceptable' reckon on removing decidedly less than half (indeed you may not realise it has been done with some chooks), and while it may regrow a bit, it never regrows to the proper pointed shape!
I simply disapprove of keeping chooks in conditions that make it 'useful'!
It doesn't stop them doing the 'all claws out' bit, but it does stop them pecking at feathers, or (even worse in a crowded barn) pecking at the exposed bum of a hen that is just finishing laying an egg. What is meant by 'cannibalism' starts from that, and once started they sometimes carry on until the injury is REALLY nasty. Chooks will peck at redness (eg a small wound) and in that barn, may cause a lot of damage when the initial scratch was trivial.