Update on the Ceramic Egg Experiment To Stop Egg-Eating Chickens

To review briefly, we've had serious issues with hens that are eating eggs in the hen house.  As soon as the eggs are laid, they eat them.  We find more broken, empty eggs in the nesting boxes than whole eggs.  We've lost dozens and dozens of eggs.  Frustrating!  We've read numerous tips on how to end this tragedy.  None of them worked.  Then we learned that if you put "fake" eggs that are ceramic in the nesting boxes it would stop the egg-eating.  The rationale behind this is that chickens will try to eat the fake eggs in the boxes and it would either hurt their beaks or it wouldn't yield food, so they would give up and stop breaking and eating eggs.

Here are the ceramic eggs = $8.99 for nine eggs delivered right to our door.

I went out the evening that the ceramic eggs came in, even though it was dark and deposited one in each nesting box.  I couldn't wait to put this remedy into immediate effect! 

Review:  Well, I'll get right to the point.  I think the people endorsing the efficacy of ceramic eggs in stopping hens from eating eggs were purveyors of ceramic eggs looking to boost sales and profit margins of their ceramic eggs in inventory.  Here's what I found the next day:

I think I even caught one hen using the ceramic egg to sharpen her beak to a finer point to enable her to peck through the eggs quicker to eat them.  I'm joking about that, but who knows!  It just may be true.

In summary, the ceramic egg experiment was a dismal failure.  Don't waste money on ceramic eggs to break hens' habit of eating their eggs.  At least I was only snookered out of $9.  The ceramic eggs will continue to sit in the nests.  Someday they might deter a chicken snake from eating more eggs.  For now, we'll continue with our current course of action, which is to make numerous trips out to the hen house to gather eggs as soon as they are laid to try to save as many as we can.  Tricia did catch one hen eating an egg today and she quarantined her in a cage.  I think that hen may be turned into a nice chicken soup this winter.  We will try to do the same for each egg-eater, but what if they've ALL picked up that bad habit?  Well, at least it will be good "soup weather" for the next couple of months.