How to Keep Chickens from Pecking and eating Eggs and MORE!

hey there folks this is josh stoneyridge farmer welcome back to another beautiful day here on the stoney ridge farm we are down here by the chicken coop and by popular request many many of you have asked for this video how do i stop my chickens from pecking my eggs and how do i entice my chickens to lay in their appropriate laying boxes so today is going to be a fun little video we're going to talk to you about preventing your chickens from eating their own eggs and how to entice them to lay in the laying box and not all over your chicken coop so come along let's have some fun all right guys so if you have chickens oftentimes when they first start laying you're gonna run into this problem the same problem i'm having right now the chicken found a corner and laid an egg right here the reason it did that is because of me not because of the chicken so we've got to make a nice habitable place for our chickens to lay their eggs come over here and i'll show you what we do welcome to the stoney ridge farm this is your first time here please pound that like button jump in subscribe the channel i'd love to have you back this is what i call the perfect chicken coop okay it's built on a four by eight platform i'll post a link to the chicken coop build at the end of this video if you're curious about how this thing is made i don't have plans for it you're gonna have to use your imagination i'm sure if you've got chickens you've got an imagination for sure so what we have is an outside laying box area here and we've got some young birds these birds are somewhere around the six to nine month age range and they're just now starting to lay eggs when they first start to lay eggs they don't know what the heck it is and they don't know where the heck to lay them so you've got to build a hospitable area for your chickens to lay their eggs let's show you ours this is an outside nesting box area right here i've got a latch on it you've got to have a latch raccoons will get up under here and push this up and get into your chickens inside this little area right here we have straw okay and the chickens have already laid eggs in this straw i just fixed this up yesterday so that i could show you guys what you need to do in order to keep your chickens from pecking their eggs and also get them laying in the appropriate spot so you've got to have good nesting in here good bedding and what we just used was hay you can go buy a bale of straw sawdust and shavings is not appropriate bedding in my opinion straw is where it's at because you want the chicken to have a dark little cave to go in and feel safe and lay their eggs okay now what we have down in these laying boxes is something that's really cool and that really helps to teach the chickens not to peck their eggs so if you've got chickens that are eating your eggs here's an easy solution to solve that and it's right over here in the laying boxes so each one of these laying boxes some of them have eggs in them already but uh this is a fresh egg right here that was just laid this morning and this is not an egg this is a clay egg you can see i put an x on it because it feels so real you can confuse these two if it didn't have the x on it you wouldn't know which egg is an egg and which egg is made out of clay so this is a clay egg i'll post a link down in the video description for you guys this is one that i just put in this morning this is one that's been in for a little bit so you see it's got a little bit of chicken poop on it that's a normal thing it's okay it's normal to have chicken poop most of your eggs aren't gonna come out this nice and this clean what happens is chickens will develop a habit they'll see that they can get a reward by pecking something that's shaped like an egg now when you put this false egg in here when they peck that they peck it and it gets some i guess it's a noxious feeling in other words they peck it and they don't get a reward because it's too hard to bust okay so when they learn that if they peck something that's shaped like an egg and it doesn't give them a reward every time they'll stop pecking eggs now does it have to be completely shaped like an egg absolutely not it does not have to be we also can use something as simple as golf balls i'll post links to those eggs that we have there and you saw it has an x on it the reason it's got an x is so we don't accidentally gather up the fake eggs and try to crack that for breakfast but you can use golf balls too i encourage if you use golf balls to use a nice clean golf ball they're going to get dirty so you'll have to clean them once every two months or so so here's the carton of clay eggs and you can see i've already got these marked and what we're going to do is we'll place these clay eggs throughout the nesting boxes in our straw or hay right there you can just go to lowe's or home depot wherever and pick yourself out a bale of straw and do this we want the rest of the coop to not be enticing for the chicken to be comfortable and lay an egg so the chicken wants to go back into a little cave and it wants to lay its egg in this little cave and that's what this provides for them having access to your eggs on the outside of the coop saves your shoes it saves your house it saves you from having to step in chicken poop and or go in a dusty chicken coop so i encourage you guys to look at the video where we build this this is one of the ceramic eggs it looks like a regular egg and this is exactly what i do to mark them so that we don't accidentally bring in a ceramic egg instead of a regular egg buy a dozen of those it'll last you five years i promise you guys so that's how you keep chickens from pecking eggs and that's how you break the habit you'll see me i'm gonna chuck in one of these as a broken egg i'm gonna chuck it in there and the chickens will go and they'll peck it and they see they don't get a reward you'll see them peck and they'll be like that's bad and they'll stop pecking your eggs they'll also do this with golf balls too so when you build your coop think about this think about having a nice little cave for the chickens to go into a nice dark spot they don't want to lay eggs out in the bright sunshine they want to be sheltered they want to be in their little happy spot in a safe spot where they can see anything that approaches them and you'll have healthy and happy chickens guys for sure and this will stop them from pecking those pesky eggs thanks a lot guys i hope you enjoyed this little video here on the stoney ridge farm today i gotta go move the cows i got a lot of work to do but i thought i'd take you guys along by popular request a lot of folks have been asking me my chickens have been pecking my eggs what do i do that's what you do that's how you fix it and this is the nesting box area that you can use to entice your chickens to lay in the nesting box and they'll learn eventually they'll learn just be patient they're creatures of habit thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on the stoney ridge to lay their eggs in a place that you want to lay yeah you want to lay ceramic egg and those were all ceramic eggs that just hit the ground fuse what just happened here hold on time out that's the first time i've had a ceramic egg break so they're hollow inside getting to know all about you getting my fresh eggs well worth it well worth having chickens every time see ya'll