Warning: saw 40 chickens crammed in a tiny coop at a place in Ohio and it's been bugging me for a week
Honestly I stopped by this small farm stand outside Columbus on a road trip and they had a coop out back that I could see from the parking lot. There were at least 40 birds in a space that couldn't have been more than 4 by 8 feet, no roosts, no nesting boxes, just bare wire floor. I asked the guy running it how many he had and he shrugged and said they just keep adding whatever people drop off. The waterer was green and the feed was just scattered on the ground so they were walking in it. Ngl I've made my share of mistakes with my 6 hens but this was something else, nobody should have birds packed in like that. Has anyone here ever reported a setup like this, and did anything actually come of it?
I mean, 4x8 for 40 birds is bad, no question, but I gotta be honest, the wire floor and no roosts part is what would worry me more than the number alone. Chickens pile on top of each other to sleep and if there's nowhere to perch they'll smother the ones on the bottom, that's a real thing. But I've also seen "rescue" folks online freak out over coops that were fine, like 8 hens in a 4x8 with a run attached is normal and people act like it's a prison. The green waterer and feed on the ground, yeah that's gross and lazy, but the guy saying people just drop birds off tells me he's running a dumping ground, not a farm. That's the actual problem. Reporting it might get the birds seized and dumped somewhere worse, so I'd want to know where they'd even go first.