Chickens Are Bullies – Can Their Behavior Teach Us About Our Own?

Bullying is most common when a new chicken or group of chickens is introduced to an existing pecking order. To head this off, a common method is to introduce the two flocks slowly by keeping the new chickens in a fenced off area near the rest of the flock for the first few days before eventually removing the fence and letting the chickens mingle. The introduction of new peers, stress, boredom, and sickness (although perhaps tilted more towards the mental than the physical variety) all made perfect sense as relevant triggers for middle school bullying, but overcrowding wasn’t an intuitive answer to me.

Source: medium.com