CoffeeintheCoop
Chirping
*** NECROPSY PICTURES **** SAD *** KIND OF GROSS ***
We lost a 2 1/2 year old Rhode Island Red hen recently. We decided to do a necropsy, since there was a lot of newbie learning curving and uncertainty, (despite a visit to a vet) and we wanted to be more informed for the future.
Mostly, I just want to post photos and ask questions about the photos, but if anyone needs a backstory detail, or if I should try to summarize the backstory, just let me know.
I am quite sure that Goldie died due to internal laying. I just want to know if I am missing anything else important, especially related to some fecal material I found in her intestines. I also have a couple extra questions.
The first picture I am uploading shows the content of her crop in a plastic ziplock bag. I thought Goldie had developed an impacted crop (it was quite hard at first), but after getting it to almost-completely empty and slowly adding food, it never returned to expected, healthy behavior. I repeatedly felt it over a week of time, and really thought she had sour crop. It felt "mushy" and "squishy". However, the crop contents had absolutely no sour or bad odor whatsoever. They just looked and smelled like a bunch of undigested feed with a few odds and ends. It seems like the texture of a malfunctioning crop doesn't always indicate a true case of sour crop. It wouldn't empty but it was not fermented. And it was not hard as impacted crops are supposed to feel like, either.
The second picture shows what I THINK are the contents of Goldie's stomach and her gizzard. I wasn't certain about whether I had both organs or not. Again, I just found undigested food, and lots of it. The sad thing is that Goldie probably starved to death, with all this food inside her body. This sort of information is exactly why we wanted to do a necropsy, so we can prevent another hen from suffering if possible. On this second image, I circled three round brown items. They seemed to be tiny rocks, but they are perfectly (or nearly) spherical. Does the action of the gizzard grind small stones into perfect spheres? We don't have a bunch of round brown stones in the yard, but we have larger, oddly-shaped brown landscape stones that may have been used by Goldie.
The next photo shows some pellets of fecal matter that I found in Goldie's intestines. These are small but very hard. Very different than all of the other objects found inside her body. In other portions of the intestines, there was wet, watery feces. But in one section, I found these pellets. I wish I could tell you more about what portion of the intestines it was, but I am not sure.
The fourth image shows the hard-boiled eggs we extracted from what I think is the oviduct (?). They were inside a fairly substantial tube that I could believe was their proper location. But they apparently were malformed, stuck and they just cooked inside her body.
The following images show what I think is a broken egg (yolk) scattered throughout her internal system. We saw the bright golden material all the way from the outside of her crop to down in her pelvic area. This is a broken, internally-laid egg, correct?
How does all of this work to harm the hen? Does the broken egg create a toxicity that poisons her so her organs don't work properly? Or did something mechanically block movement of food through her system and/ or mechanically block the eggs from moving down the oviduct correctly? Goldie had a bad day along the trajectory of her decline, and then "someone" laid a cooked egg overnight and Goldie obviously felt a whole lot better the next day. I was surprised to find the cooked egg material inside a long muscular tube, that seemed like a good place for eggs to be found. Their diameter and shape indicates the tube from which we squeezed them. I think they were all connected as one mass, but broke apart as we squeezed them out, as if squeezing out dried-up toothpaste. But nothing had shells, and I saw no weird shell-type material inside her body anywhere.
And... one last question that doesn't have a photo to accompany it. The vet told us that internal laying is "very rare" and even with an X-ray, he didn't recognize that she might be dying from internal laying. He checked a fecal sample and found worms. (We aren't sure what type of worms yet, I need to clarify that). But I opened up her intestines to see if I could find some significant mass of worms that would indicate her cause of death. I didn't see any. However, her body froze hard prior to our necropsy, due to scheduling issues. Would intestinal worms even be visible in small quantities after thoroughly freezing? Or would they kind of disintegrate? I did see some long stringy matter, very soft and soupy, as if the fecal material itself had kind of a stringy consistency, inside her intestines, but I couldn't have said they were worms. This issue is complicated by the fact that I fed her 8 earthworms only a few days prior to her death. There is no way to really know, but curious if I may have seen worms of some sort inside the intestines.
Thank you so much in advance for any and all thoughts shared.
We lost a 2 1/2 year old Rhode Island Red hen recently. We decided to do a necropsy, since there was a lot of newbie learning curving and uncertainty, (despite a visit to a vet) and we wanted to be more informed for the future.
Mostly, I just want to post photos and ask questions about the photos, but if anyone needs a backstory detail, or if I should try to summarize the backstory, just let me know.
I am quite sure that Goldie died due to internal laying. I just want to know if I am missing anything else important, especially related to some fecal material I found in her intestines. I also have a couple extra questions.
The first picture I am uploading shows the content of her crop in a plastic ziplock bag. I thought Goldie had developed an impacted crop (it was quite hard at first), but after getting it to almost-completely empty and slowly adding food, it never returned to expected, healthy behavior. I repeatedly felt it over a week of time, and really thought she had sour crop. It felt "mushy" and "squishy". However, the crop contents had absolutely no sour or bad odor whatsoever. They just looked and smelled like a bunch of undigested feed with a few odds and ends. It seems like the texture of a malfunctioning crop doesn't always indicate a true case of sour crop. It wouldn't empty but it was not fermented. And it was not hard as impacted crops are supposed to feel like, either.
The second picture shows what I THINK are the contents of Goldie's stomach and her gizzard. I wasn't certain about whether I had both organs or not. Again, I just found undigested food, and lots of it. The sad thing is that Goldie probably starved to death, with all this food inside her body. This sort of information is exactly why we wanted to do a necropsy, so we can prevent another hen from suffering if possible. On this second image, I circled three round brown items. They seemed to be tiny rocks, but they are perfectly (or nearly) spherical. Does the action of the gizzard grind small stones into perfect spheres? We don't have a bunch of round brown stones in the yard, but we have larger, oddly-shaped brown landscape stones that may have been used by Goldie.
The next photo shows some pellets of fecal matter that I found in Goldie's intestines. These are small but very hard. Very different than all of the other objects found inside her body. In other portions of the intestines, there was wet, watery feces. But in one section, I found these pellets. I wish I could tell you more about what portion of the intestines it was, but I am not sure.
The fourth image shows the hard-boiled eggs we extracted from what I think is the oviduct (?). They were inside a fairly substantial tube that I could believe was their proper location. But they apparently were malformed, stuck and they just cooked inside her body.
The following images show what I think is a broken egg (yolk) scattered throughout her internal system. We saw the bright golden material all the way from the outside of her crop to down in her pelvic area. This is a broken, internally-laid egg, correct?
How does all of this work to harm the hen? Does the broken egg create a toxicity that poisons her so her organs don't work properly? Or did something mechanically block movement of food through her system and/ or mechanically block the eggs from moving down the oviduct correctly? Goldie had a bad day along the trajectory of her decline, and then "someone" laid a cooked egg overnight and Goldie obviously felt a whole lot better the next day. I was surprised to find the cooked egg material inside a long muscular tube, that seemed like a good place for eggs to be found. Their diameter and shape indicates the tube from which we squeezed them. I think they were all connected as one mass, but broke apart as we squeezed them out, as if squeezing out dried-up toothpaste. But nothing had shells, and I saw no weird shell-type material inside her body anywhere.
And... one last question that doesn't have a photo to accompany it. The vet told us that internal laying is "very rare" and even with an X-ray, he didn't recognize that she might be dying from internal laying. He checked a fecal sample and found worms. (We aren't sure what type of worms yet, I need to clarify that). But I opened up her intestines to see if I could find some significant mass of worms that would indicate her cause of death. I didn't see any. However, her body froze hard prior to our necropsy, due to scheduling issues. Would intestinal worms even be visible in small quantities after thoroughly freezing? Or would they kind of disintegrate? I did see some long stringy matter, very soft and soupy, as if the fecal material itself had kind of a stringy consistency, inside her intestines, but I couldn't have said they were worms. This issue is complicated by the fact that I fed her 8 earthworms only a few days prior to her death. There is no way to really know, but curious if I may have seen worms of some sort inside the intestines.
Thank you so much in advance for any and all thoughts shared.
