Bumblefoot - can I ignore it?

[Amykins]

I'm happy he finally got the surgery he needed, but I'm having a hard time understanding why you waited three months to fix the issue.

 

[Henrik Petersson]

I'm happy he finally got the surgery he needed, but I'm having a hard time understanding why you waited three months to fix the issue.

Great question!

The answer is that the ducks aren't mine. They're my parents'. My parents live in a big house with a big back yard, and I live in a tiny apartment roughly two hours away from them. I just refer to the ducks (and chickens) as "mine" on message boards like these because it's simpler.

I can usually only visit my parents on the weekends, and if I want to do something with the ducks and chickens that need two people - such as treating bumblefoot - I have to wait until my parents are up for it, which they often aren't.

I don't want to bad-mouth my parents, but they are a lot less interested in animals than I am, and, well, a lot more complacent about them than I am. I am always the one that researches fowl health problems online, for example.

Their complacency drives me nuts, to be honest, but I've found that nagging only makes my parents less inlcined to help.

 

[Amykins]

Wow. They don't deserve to have animals. What a cruel and sociopathic thing, to just let an animal suffer for no reason other than apathy.

Sorry, I mean I know they're your parents, but I just get so mad when people harm an animal!

 

[Henrik Petersson]

Wow. They don't deserve to have animals. What a cruel and sociopathic thing, to just let an animal suffer for no reason other than apathy.

Sorry, I mean I know they're your parents, but I just get so mad when people harm an animal!

I know. They're not bad people in other respects, just bad animal keepers.

 

[Amykins]

Eh, if you say so. But I'm still gonna be mad

 

[Krazyquilts]

I hope your poor lil guy is still doing well.

If you do run into this issue again, I found that Blu-Kote worked really great on the very mild cases of bumblefoot that two of my ducks had. I tried Vetericyn at first, combined with scraping out the infected spots with very sharp sterilized tweezers, and was spraying it every few days but it didn't seems to do much (besides upset the ducks, poor things). Then Lisa from Cedar Crest Farm and Feed (which is where I get my duck feed) recommended Blu-Kote and that seemed to fix the problem almost overnight! (Again, combined with scraping out the infected spots before applying it.)

Edited because I screwed up the link.