Ex battery hens, how long to establish pecking order?

[gettingtherequickly]

Hi all,

I hope someone can help with a bit of advice please, I'm new to chicken keeping and collected 4 ex battery hens 24 hours ago, (looking a bit bedraggled).

They have a coop which was supposed to be big enough for 6-8 hens (3 nesting boxes) and a double sized run.

One of the hens is considerably smaller than the others, and is being picked on by the largest two. (Pecks, but no blood drawn).

I know they have to sort out the hierarchy, but can anyone tell me how long I should leave it before I intervene? (Already sprayed her with anti pek spray this morning).

It's just so hard to watch, she's taken to hiding in the coop.

So having done several chicken group introductions :-) my advice would be to keep them seperate during the day, build a temp run next to your main one and keep them apart for a week like that, overnight stick them all in together from the start.

My second piece of advice is sudo creme is just as good as purple spray.

My first introduction went horribly wrong and one of my lovely hens got seriously injured so i phoned up a lovely old chap who supplied the hens for advice and that's what he said and i have followed that advice for subsequent introductions and never had a problem since.

The interesting thing was - the hen that did the attacking was the Number 2 hen in the pecking order, and when I put them in together at night the top hen spent the night inbetween the injured hen and the number 2.

Last interesting thing I promise :-) I have kept about 8 or so different breeds (pure breed and hybrids) plus ex batts together over 9 years, its always been the White Leghorn hybrid (think the cornflake box chicken) that has been the top hen, even though they are smaller.

Thank you so much for the update.
Chickpea unfortunately passed away on Thursday, my lovely husband has agreed to getting two more ex batteries, so I need to introduce them as safely as possible.

Perfect timing for me to check this thread.