Rooster Spurs – and How to Trim Them — Randy’s Chicken Blog

Pliers with a Hot Potato

There’s another method that you will see bandied about that I think is abhorrent and barbaric. Grab the spur with a pair of pliers, squeeze gently, and wiggle the spur back and forth until the entire outer keratinous sheath of the spur detaches from the inner core and you can pull it completely off. What remains (and remains exposed) is the live inner core. There will be blood with this procedure and it will cause pain. Plus, the exposed tissue is prone to becoming infected.

I suggest that this process is on par with grabbing your fingernail with pliers and pulling it out by the roots. If you were to have your fingernails pulled out, you would probably wince, scream, and cry. Chickens don’t do any of those things when their spurs are pulled off, leading to the belief in certain quarters that they are not in pain. Here’s the headline: Chickens don’t react to pain the way humans do. Chickens are part of a social group pecking order and they are prey animals. They put themselves at a disadvantage if they display a reaction to pain. Their stoicism is an evolved self-preservation response. But the pain they feel is every bit on the same scale as the pain we humans feel.

A variation on the “pliers” method is to first plunge the spur into a hot potato before applying the pliers, to “loosen it up.” This method scalds living tissue before it is ripped away. No. Just no.

We trimmed after poultry bedtime, and it went fast. We nabbed each of the guys off the roost one at a time. Kathy was the holder and I was the trimmer. I used a clipper for this session, and I got the job done with one clip per spur. While we had styptic on hand, we didn’t need it.

Emile, as the alpha roo, got to be first. He seemed fairly stressed by the whole deal. I’m pretty sure he was frantically thinking “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME??!!”  But in no time at all he was back on the roost, with a shortened spur that was no longer threatening to grow back into his shank.

Paul brought up the rear. Paul’s spurs are so amazingly large that had they been any bigger, I would not have been able to use the clippers. But I quickly and painlessly got the job done and then Paul was also securely back on the roost in the comfort of the coop. Paul, a frizzled bantam Cochin, is the smallest roo, at the bottom of the pecking order, and is also covered in very silly curly feathers. So, the fact that his spurs are so large that they barely fit in the clippers undoubtedly goes a long way toward assuaging his self-esteem.

It’s nice when life sometimes benevolently evens things out.