My first thought was that they had no idea it was a fox and were just trying to kill something. The reason poultry feed has to be scattered over a wide area is that they will peck through other chickens, killing them in the process, before turning and eating from an open spot if they feel they need to compete for food. Turkeys are worse than chickens. An amish turkey farmer once told me that if you leave a bucket of feed with the turkeys you’ll end up with a bucket of dead, half-eaten turkeys and all of the feed you started with.

I understand that they'd kill each other, but why would they all kill each other, who eats them, and who puts the carcasses in the bucket?

So many questions this raises...

They get into the bucket to get the food and are pecked to death by the one that climbs in on top of them, and so on.

Oh wow, that's brutal. Thanks for explaining.

Yes it’s common to clip their beaks when they’re young to prevent nipping at each other.

When I was two, my family took me to my grandma's farm, where she had all kinds of animals, including chickens. As a curious two-year-old, I ran up to the chicken pen to take a look, and a rooster lunged at me aggressively. Luckily there was wire between us, so no harm done, but it scared me so much that I had nightmares about that rooster for the next ten years.

We had that rooster for dinner that night, so he got what he deserved. :)

Ouch! Sounds more like you had him for dinner and he got his revenge by haunting you for 10 years...

Ha! I never thought of it that way! Yes maybe it was karma but not against the rooster.

They can get really savage if they see blood. Watching someone in jandals with red nail polish go near some was quite the scene.

Confused at why comments like this get downvoted. What does that signify?

Chickens have this weird "IT'S BLEEDING. MURDER IT!" kinda vibe.

There's literally rose-tinted glasses you can glue onto their beaks so they can't really perceive red. This prevents them from pecking each-other to death.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_eyeglasses

If you've ever watched a chicken hunt mice, you know what mammals went through the last 200 million years.

I have seen a chicken hunting mice. It's absolutely astounding. Before seeing it in action I had no idea chickens would go after such large prey, or that they would be such efficient hunters. They must have amazing eyesight, or some other ability to detect prey, because they appear to be able to detect hiding rodents from a long way away.

This was a local wild chicken that had presumably escaped from a coop, and it appeared to sustain itself on mice all summer.

For the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBFXzyp3sks

Here's this hen strolling through the backyard, humming her tune and tentatively pecking at things. You're watching her, contemplating how dinosaurs might have looked the same and how they must have moved in those alien ways. One second later she's raced into a shrub and plucked a mouse from between the leaves on the ground.

And you can't help but feel a pang of regret for the vermin. You lost many of your ancestors in just this way. You're a survivor. Tomorrow you're going to eat that egg. In revenge.

The worst that I ever saw was one chicken deliberately scaring another chicken into an oncoming car, then rushing in to eat the victim's guts.

I saw this 2 months ago in Thailand.

How do you know it was deliberate?

I couldn't read the chicken's mind. But it waited a good long time for a car to come down that road before doing its thing. I would have had trouble believing it to be a lucky (for it) accident.

Crows are known to drop nuts on highways for cars to crack em up. They've also learned to read traffic lights to know when it's safe to pick up their bounty.

However, chickens aren't known to be planners.

That's a pretty good strat, I guess.

Geese will do a pretty good number on a kid. 'Biting', honking, my grandmother had a few geese when we were growing up and I got attacked a few times coming in the drive, and my younger brother was absolutely terrified of them

Also, geese hiss....there's something about things that hiss at you.

One of the more harrowing things i've done was a day addling geese eggs on a lake where they're overpopulated. There was two of us.in the canoe. Whenever we found a nest we'd switch duties between sneaking up to the nest to do the egg addling, while the other stood guard with a paddle to ward off the attacking geese.

When we bought our first four geese, we had one gander that was just mean like you occasionally get with a rooster. He managed to chase my daughter's friend and scratch the back of her leg with his claws. (Geese have surprisingly sharp claws at the end of their webbed feet).

Speaking of them being assholes, won't they also pick at their _own_ eggs?

They do. That's why collection is done early and throughout the day.

Battery cages are slightly sloped so that eggs roll out of the cage, out of reach of the birds and for easy egg collection by workers.