Laying hen flocks undergo depopulation at end of lay, a difficult process that has been associated with injuries and is considered stressful to hens and human collectors. To date, most assessments of depopulations have been conducted within cage housing systems, layers, or noncage broilers, thus offering little relevance to noncage laying hen systems including aviaries. Given that the predominant housing systems in Switzerland are multitier aviaries and their growing popularity in general, our study was undertaken to establish a baseline for hen injuries and stress as well as the experience of human workers during depopulation. For the effort, a total of 15 individual farms were visited, and a battery of assessments was made on a total of 603 individual end-of-lay hens. In addition, potentially influential factors such as time of day, handling duration, or time into depopulation were recorded and analyzed. The results suggest that approximately 8.1% of hens sustain severe injuries (i.e., fractures and muscle damage) or exhibit a considerable stress reaction (i.e., increased corticosterone levels), whereas 90% of laying hens are only mildly affected.

产蛋鸡的产蛋鸡群在产蛋结束时会减少种群数量，这是一个与受伤相关的困难过程，被认为对母鸡和人类采集者造成压力。迄今为止，大多数人口减少的评估都是在笼舍系统，蛋鸡或非笼养肉鸡中进行的，因此与包括笼舍在内的非笼养母鸡系统几乎没有关系。鉴于瑞士主要的住房系统是多层鸟舍，并且它们在总体上日益普及，因此我们进行了研究，以为母鸡受伤和压力以及人口减少期间的人工经验建立基准。为了这项工作，总共访问了15个个体农场，并对总共603头个体末尾母鸡进行了一系列评估。此外，潜在影响因素还包括一天中的时间，记录并分析处理持续时间或人口减少时间。结果表明，约8.1％的母鸡受到重伤（即骨折和肌肉损伤）或表现出明显的应激反应（即皮质酮水平升高），而90％的蛋鸡仅受到轻度影响。