For those who have brabanters, how has their overall health been for you? Mine seem to be having health issues recently. I have 4 now (My rooster and 2 hens got killed, and I found one hen dead in the lot one day with no visible injury signs when she was still only a few months old). They are all around 2 years old. Of the 4 I have left, all of them have stopped laying eggs. One developed a swollen, crusty face, like she has warts all over her face. I posted her on the diseases/injury page last summer, and people seemed to think it was fowl pox, which was also what I was thinking as well. I waited for it to run its course, but it hasn't, and her condition has now started to worsen.
Now, she has started losing weight and feathers, and her face has never gone back to normal. She is still eating and drinking but doesn't look well at all and feels very emaciated when I pick her up. Her keel bone is very prominent.
I have also been treating another brabanter who developed an ear infection(?) a couple weeks ago. Her ear lobe on one side is swollen and distended, and she seems to have developed some kind of abscess underneath it on the side of her beak.
The other 2 hens look healthy, but none have been laying for the past several months. All of my chickens took a winter break, but the brabanters still haven't started back even though the rest of the birds they were with have.
I've wormed all 4 of the brabanter hens, treated the 2 sickly ones with Sulmet, mixed some ACV with all their water before I started the Sulmet treatment to see if that helped first. I've been mixing yogurt and powdered milk in with the feed of the 2 getting the Sulmet to promote good intestinal bacteria and help east the Sulmet treatment. I've also sprayed Blue-Kote/Wound-Kote on the ear of the one hen.
I'm not noticing any improvement, and the other 2 that also got wormed are still not laying any eggs. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? Are brabanters prone to illness due to there being such a small gene pool of them in the U.S.? None of my other birds are showing any similar signs as these, so I don't ~think~ they have anything contagious, but I'm wondering if it would be better to keep treating the sickly ones or cull the 2 sickly ones or all of them and maybe wait and order some more eventually (all of mine came from Ideal)? I was planning on trying to breed them, but I lost my rooster early on so never had a chance to do that.
