How To Break A Broody Hen Safely

Watching a hen raise chicks is a beautiful experience, but there are also many good reasons to discourage or break broodiness in your flock. If you’re sure you have a broody hen (not sure? Read this first!) and won’t be providing her with eggs or chicks, then breaking her broodiness is the best thing to do for her health and well-being. 
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In this post, we’ll go over five ways to break a broody hen humanely.

​But First, Why It’s Kind to Break Your Hen’s Broodiness

Broodiness is stressful for a hen, as she is eating, drinking, and dust bathing far less. If you don’t desire to add to your flock, or if you don’t have fertile eggs or chicks available for your broody, then you may need to intervene to stop her broody behavior. This is known as “breaking” a broody.
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After twenty-one days of broodiness, the length of time it takes a hen to hatch eggs, your hen’s internal clock will hopefully signal her to give up on her nest. You could wait that long, but ideally you’ll be able to successfully apply these interventions earlier to prevent unneeded stress in your hen.

Four Ways to Break a Broody Hen Safely and Humanely

​Here are five ways to break a broody humanely, from least to most invasive. We recommend trying the less invasive methods first, and if they don’t work, going down the list until you’ve broken the broody spell.

1. Incubate ice packs. Replace your hen’s eggs with ice packs. Some folks swear by this method but it has not worked for us (yet). Our broody just sat on those ice packs like they were fertile eggs until they thawed, day after day. If you do try this, I’d recommend hard ice packs, not the bags with gel that could be pecked open.

2. Lock her out of the coop for the day to free range with her flock, and return her directly to the roost after dark.

3. Continually remove your hen from her nest. Carry her around while you do chores, distract her with treats, and just keep her moving. She may protest, but this is overall a very chill way to intervene.

4. Give her a cool bath. Note: this is only a strategy for warm summer days–not for cool weather broodies! Give your hen a gentle cold soak and a good towel dry, and release her back outside. The cold water may help shock her out of her broodiness, and she’ll also be distracted for a while with preening and drying off.

5. Send her to “broody jail”. Place your hen in a wire cage that is either suspended in the air or elevated off the floor with boards or cement blocks. Do not place bedding or flooring in the cage--just put some cardboard underneath it to catch droppings. The lack of coziness and the inability to nest in this cage will help break her, though it can take anywhere from 2-6 days to do the trick. 

You’ll know you’ve successfully broken your hen’s broodiness when she resumes her normal, everyday, social chicken behavior. She’ll rejoin the flock’s daily activities, and you’ll no longer find her hunkered down in the nesting box for hours or days at a time. It can take a couple weeks for her to start laying eggs again, though, so don’t be alarmed if she doesn’t lay for a bit.

Conclusion

Broodiness adds additional stress to a hen, so the best thing to do for a hen that will not be hatching or adopting chicks is to intervene and interrupt the broody cycle in a humane way.

For more information, check out our comprehensive post on how to care for broody hens.