Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feather pecking, the pecking at or removal of feathers from one bird by another, is a problem in the poultry industry. Elimination of damaging feather pecking from flocks is made especially difficult by the numerous factors that appear to influence its prevalence. This review outlines the various contributors to feather pecking organised around Tinbergen's four questions on causation, ontogeny, phylogeny and function. There is growing evidence that feather pecking (especially severe feather pecking) is related to foraging motivation and gut function. However, other factors, such as improper early experiences, strain and individual differences and perseveration of the behaviour help explain its continued occurrence, even if the birds are kept in enriched environments. To date, methods of dealing with feather pecking are inadequate and involve welfare concerns of their own and alternate solutions, such as provision of forages, are not usually successful in abolishing feather pecking behaviour. The problems of excessive pelage/plummage removal or redirected oral/foraging related behaviour are not unique to poultry and seem to occur in other species in which foraging and forage intake is important. Between species comparisons of related behaviour patterns may improve our understanding of feather pecking and help to design effective solutions. In order to solve the problem of feather pecking, the factors discussed in this review need to be accounted for or we risk applying ‘band-aid’ solutions, which may appear outwardly to be solving the problem. However, the underlying cause(s) may still be present and the animal's welfare may still be compromised.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".