Butcher Injured Chickens

[thelinuxfan]

Hello!

I have some cornish rocks that are close to butcher time. Unfortunately, it got extremely hot, humid, and very buggy. We did what we could to help them through it, but some of them have injured themselves on their flank. Basically the furthest they can reach. The wounds look something like this:

We are treating it with antibiotics, but there are multiple chickens that are suffering from it, so it isn't really possible to separate them. I think this is because of the gnat and small bugs that came out during spring. I am also dusting for insects, but it has calmed down since last week.

Is it safe to butcher the chickens with these cuts? Some of them are bigger than the ones in the picture and most of them are starting to scab over. They are not infected yet. If they do become infected, is it still safe to butcher?

These chickens have had the worst experience. We purchased them from Welp which was a huge PITA because they shipped them 2 months before we ordered them, so we were not completely prepared for this as we had another group of layers that were taking most of our chick resources. We lost around 10 due to coccidiosis in the first week. Some of them are much smaller than they should be as well.

Any advice would be appreciated!
Jacob

 

[Molpet]

I butcher injured birds as soon as possible. I cut out the injuries.
I don't harvest infected birds. Might be ok because cooking kills a lot of bacteria.

 

[FunClucks]

I had two chickens out of 25 that had wounds like that around 3-4 wks old. I think they cut each other up with their claws when trying to climb over each other's rear ends to get to the food. I fixed the issue by going from a round gravity feeder to a 10 ft long plastic gutter feeder, so there was no more competition, and each bird had at least one foot of feeder space. Still had some bloody scratches on the rear ends after I changed the feeder, but no large wounds with cut through skin. They had two 5 gal buckets with 5 horizontal nipples each, so I think the scratches I still saw were from water competition.

I treated the wounds that look like what yours have with topical neosporin twice a day. Eventually everything healed up but it took 2-3 weeks until it was just a scab instead of a semi-infected/unhappy scab.

I figured once the chickens healed up fully, or with an uninfected scab, they were ok to eat, but didn't actually get to butcher them because they dropped dead of random heart attack before I could. One was a runt (so I was not surprised), and one was a female with no contributing factors other than being CX. I'm pretty new to meat birds, so it didn't occur to me that eating the injured birds would be an issue once they had healed.

Sorry you had a bad experience with Welp - I had an excellent experience with them. If you clicked the ASAP button by accident when placing your order, I can see why they sent the chicks as soon as you placed your order, instead of during the week you requested them. Do you think you might have done that? It was easy to miss that button and possibly click it by mistake.

All but one of my Welp chicks was healthy and grew very well. I harvested 21/25 from weeks 5 to week 9. One loss was my fault, and the other two - one was a runt and one a female that died of heart attack around week 8, and one loss due to random heart attack during week 2. I also had one bird lose ability to walk around week 7, but I harvested that one successfully. Hatch date for my batch was January 25.