Button Quail with swelling...any ideas?

[chooks4life]

Thanks for all your replies. Yes I realize that they HAVE to lay. I meant that she was doing all the normal things not like a sick bird...running about, eating, drinking, dusting AND laying too.

I understood your post fine, I was responding to the other person, who I should have quoted, to clear up confusion. They said:

Seeing as this is a button I would let her live out her life like this if she Is laying she must not be in pain.

Which we obviously both know isn't the fact of the matter.

Sorry to hear she passed. At least it was quick.

On a side note, may not be related... Whenever I've seen quails for sale here, they've been terribly ill. You know that sort of weepy-eyed, white-faced, hunchy sort of appearance that usually bodes ill. Whenever I question their health I'm told 'they're wormed every month' --- that, I imagine, would have something to do with it! Poor things. On the other hand I've seen the other sort of quail kept by people who look quite healthy.

For my own curiosity I cut open the lump. The skin over it was vascular but the inside was just like raw chicken meat! I definitely think it was a tumor.

Definitely sounds like it, couldn't really have been anything else. In general the whiter an animal gets the more prone to cancer. Same with those paler colors that have been bred into usually darker species.

 

[Terri O]

Definitely sounds like it, couldn't really have been anything else. In general the whiter an animal gets the more prone to cancer. Same with those paler colors that have been bred into usually darker species.

This is very interesting. I wonder if that is why all those lab rats I had ended up with tumors?

 

[chooks4life]

This is very interesting. I wonder if that is why all those lab rats I had ended up with tumors?

Lol, yeah, if you got them from a lab, there is basically no chance they won't die of some systematic failure or cancer, unless they were normal pet rat strains bought by the lab to test behavioural responses or similar. You can buy lab rats and mice around here too that are guaranteed to have a specific issue wrong with them. Since it's developed to breed true in most cases, they could precipitate an ecosystem failure if released and widely bred with normal rats and mice. Many, many species depend on rodents like them, and many species depend on the animals that depend on them, lol.