Impact of nutritional factors on eating behavior and feather damage of laying hens

Feather pecking remains one of the major problems facing the poultry industry. It is assumed that feather pecking behavior is a substitute for normal ground pecking or feeding behavior in the absence of adequate foraging incentives. This justifies a nutritional approach of this problem. Although energy and Non Starch Polysaccharides (NSP) concentrations and particle size of the added NSP source seem to reduce feather pecking behavior in laying hens, these nutritional factors were often confounded in experimental diet