Bumble foot journey coming to an end

[Kanga77510]

I've been treating bumble foot since Memorial Day. I'm so tired of doing it all, I called in reinforcements. I'm happy to say the feet issues will be resolved soon. DH and I talked and he said I should cull the ones that weren't improving. I just can't bring myself to do it-the girls are doing fine otherwise (not to mention I have a lot of freakin' time invested in these birds). OK yes, I did recently do it, but that was a meat bird raised to be put in my freezer. I couldn't bring myself to cull one of the hens.

I found an avian specialist vet in the area, and took one of the birds in today. The vet confirmed that it is indeed bumble foot (which I knew), and gave me medicine to treat the feet-Silvadene cream. The hen I took in got a shot of antibiotics as well. She gave me tons of betadine solution and other supplies for free; I guess she gets them as promotional items or something from the company and passes them on to folks who could use them.

Those girls better start laying some good eggs so I recoup the cost of the vet visit. But really, spread over the number of birds I have, it wasn't much. The vet was also pretty impressed with how far I'd treated them, gotten one girl almost healed up. Thanks, BYC, for all the advice and support. I will not be sorry to see the bumble foot infection go bye-bye.

 

[dawg53]

You're lucky to have an avian vet AND knew about chickens! What a deal, free betadine!! Cant beat that! That stuff runs about $10 for a small bottle at walmart. The problem with bumblefoot is when we let it go for so long, the infection works its way in deeper and it's tough to treat/cure and culling then becomes necessary to prevent the chicken from suffering. I normally go in after it when I first see a chicken start to limp, that tells me there's an infection. I've seen and pulled black scabs off their pads without seeing the limp and nothing was in there, even after the soaking and digging around. That's when I decided to wait for the first limp...why should I risk cutting small tendons,muscles,nerves etc...when there's no infection etc...? Sounds like you did a superb job on your surgeries and now you'll be able to help others here with the same issues.

 

[Jster]

I worked hard on two chickens we have that have bumblefoot, they are white leghorns. They've never had any trouble walking, and all the treatments I did did little to help...the swelling would go down and then a few weeks later come back. So I just decided to stop fighting it. That was about two years ago, those chickens are just fine, still never had any trouble walking or signs of discomfort, and they seem to have it on and off (just those two).

Sometimes we try to treat things, and maybe it's just that critters' normal. My two cents...