What you are dealing in the 4 square feet in the coop along with 10 square feet in the run is a guideline, not an absolute law of nature. It’s something that is intended to keep practically everyone from Minneapolis to Miami, Denver to San Diego, Perth Australia to Inverness Scotland out of trouble, even with widely varying management techniques. It’s overkill for a lot of people as far as the absolute minimum room they need, but it’s a good starting point. I don’t believe in magic numbers for much of anything to do with chickens, but if someone has no experience with chickens they need a starting point. And this is geared more for people living in suburbia with a limited number of chickens, not a rural setting where space and neighbors are less restrictive.
There are a lot of things involved in how many chickens you can shoehorn into a teeny tiny space. Things like the personality of your individual chickens and how well they take confinement, flock make-up, climate, your management techniques, and who knows what else.
In many ways “coop space” is pretty irrelevant. Its how much space they have and when it is available. It doesn’t matter if that space is in the coop, coop and run, or they totally free range and sleep in trees. It needs to be available when they are awake. If all you use your coop for is a place for them to sleep and they have access to more space as soon as they wake up, the coop does not need to be big at all. The more you leave them locked in there the bigger the coop needs to be.
How you manage them has a big part to play too. Commercial operations have proven you can keep chickens in as little as 2 square feet for each chicken, but these are all hen flocks (no roosters), the hens have been specifically bred to take confinement really well, and they still trim their beaks to keep them from eating each other.
I’m an advocate for providing as much space as reasonable for three reasons. I find that I have fewer behavioral problems to deal with if more space is provided. The behaviors I’m talking about range from feather-picking, fighting, aggression, to cannibalism. Chickens have learned to live together in a flock but one thing that makes that possible is that the weaker will run away from the stronger if there is conflict. They need room to run away.
I find I don’t work as hard if they have more room. An easy example is poop management. They poop a lot. The more restricted they are, the more the poop builds up and the more I have to manage it.
The more room I have to work with, the more flexibility I have in managing things that happen. Say you restrict their coop space so you have no choice except to let them out at the crack of dawn every day of the year but you want to sleep in in a Saturday. Maybe you get a blizzard where they can’t get out for a few days. Say you have a predator that is killing off your flock and you need to be somewhere else. If you don’t have enough space to leave them locked up safe, what are you going to do? Most predators won’t hang around until you get a good shot.
Will you ever want to add new chickens? That goes a whole lot easier if they have space. Will you ever want a broody hen to raise chicks with the flock? The hen’s job is a lot easier if she has room to work with.
That’s my take on how much room chickens need. You can often get by with less than the magic numbers of 4 and 10, but you may have days where your stress level gets pretty high. It’s not about pampering your chickens, it’s about pampering yourself. How much pampering are you worth?
