My Chicks foot is stuck like this forever?!?!?!??!

When chicks hatch they are incredibly delicate.Sometimes they get their legs tangled when they hatch.there isn't anything you can do except surgery which is very expensive and it only has a 50/50 chance of waking up from the anaesthetic.

I have a chick living out in the coop with the adults right now, and Scout's feet looked like this before I began to bandage them for straightening:


Scout's feet were damaged from severe frostbite, which I treated the best way I could. This is as much straightening as we got:


She (or he) couldn't continue to live in the house, so we made the decision to accept what we got and see how she did. She's been out in the coop now for a few weeks. She flies up onto the roost at night and roosts with the others, and she flies back down in the morning. She can outrun me when I need to catch her for checkups. It's been in the teens below zero and she's thriving. Her feet don't slow her down one little bit. We suspect that the frostbite may have damaged the nerves to them, so she is most likely not in any pain from them. She'll be three months old on the 28th and we are so glad that she continues to thrive.

Scout up on the roost, taken a couple of weeks ago.

Maybe I have more admiration for Scout because I also have a 3 year old granddaughter with Spina Bifida. Kendra has no nerves to her feet - she can't feel contact with the floor and even when her braces gave her blisters she didn't let on that anything was wrong - she couldn't feel the discomfort that we would feel. Because there aren't nerves firing muscles and tendons in her feet, they remain in an abnormal position. She has a disability, but since God forgot to tell her we aren't going to tell her either. She's learned her own way to get around and is becoming quite independent. She's been in her wheelchair since she was 9 months old, and she maneuvers it around like a pro, too. She's pulling herself up and taking a few steps along the furniture. We expect Kendra to do well, and we let her invent her own ways to get things done. It's the same way with Scout. She has no idea she's different, the other chickens don't know she's different, and she gets along just fine by using her own ways to get things done.

I guess what I'm trying to say is first to try to find out if your chick is limping because the foot doesn't work, or if she limps because it's painful. That would be the deciding factor for me - if she's in serious pain then perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to cull her. But if the limp is only because the foot doesn't function correctly, I'm all for discontinuing the stressful splinting and just let her learn to be a chicken, using her own ways to accomplish what the others do naturally. In our case the other chickens don't pick on Scout (she could outrun them anyway and she has a few hidey holes to duck into out in the coop and run) and Scout gets plenty to eat, access to the water and fits smack in the middle of the pecking order - neither top hen nor rejected by the others.

Good luck to you with your little chick. Scout's entire story can be found by clicking the link in my signature. It shows the resiliency of these little critters and at the end there's a link to a video of our little stinker running all over the place. Oh, and because of all the miserable things I did to her to save her, she hates me. Won't come anywhere near me. That's okay - her job isn't to be my lap chicken anyway. She comes to my husband and allows him to pick her up very easily. But she'll never be my buddy. I don't care as long as she gets every chance to be "just another chicken".

That's an awfully sweet story, Blooie. Thank you.