Cartilage, chicken walking like pinguin/man

[Drieslag]

Anyone seen this before, http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.1966213?
I have!

A cockerel of mine had something very similar.
Couldn't find out what it was, the vet neither.
Nothing to do with calcium, Mareks, or whatever...

Anyone know where it comes from?
It 's supposed to be some sort of cartilage disease, but found no official name to it.

Eventually I had to put my cockerel out of its misery.

 

[chooks4life]

Anyone seen this before, http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.1966213?
I have!

A cockerel of mine had something very similar.
Couldn't find out what it was, the vet neither.
Nothing to do with calcium, Mareks, or whatever...

Anyone know where it comes from?
It 's supposed to be some sort of cartilage disease, but found no official name to it.

Eventually I had to put my cockerel out of its misery.

As far as I can guess, it's most likely to be an injury between thighs and back or pelvis.

Some bone or muscle or tendon that holds them horizontal is broken and they slip to vertical, and need to be put down. I have only once seen something similar and the hen didn't last more than a few months in that state; it randomly happened to a friend's hen who was over a year old at the time. She walked on her hocks though, but penguin-style-upright too. Could not jump.

It wasn't genetic as far as I know... But if I keep seeing it only in birds that look like the same breed I will begin to doubt that, lol.

Best wishes.

 

[Drieslag]

Don't know how much longer the cockerel would have lived, but he actually got it at very young age.
Didn't have a comb yet and didn't crow.

Anyway, I was nursing it with whatever I could and it happily grew and put on weight quickly.
Probably as it was resting a lot.

It developed a comb and started to crow in the end, so except for his handicap it did seem to be in 'good health'.

No tail or tail feathers however as he always was walking on his behind more or less and damaged the feathers constantly.

Strange thing was that when he pooped, it seemed to come out of his navel. In fact his back was arched that much forward that his cloaca was pointing that way.

I never took pictures but if anyone did, please share.

 

[chooks4life]

Wow, sounds severe. Severe skeletal deformity in your cockerel's case, perhaps? With the one I knew it was an otherwise normal hen. She was an Isabrown. What sort was yours?

 

[Drieslag]

It was a Chaams, a breed very closely related to the Braekel and Campine.
They're being bred again intensively after years of neglect.
Perhaps there's too much inbreeding going on...

 

[chooks4life]

My vote is on the inbreeding, or just bad breeding, personally. Strange and uncommon issue, it seems.

Too bad you didn't post-mortem him, but it can be a rather unsavory task when you're attached to an animal and have put in the time to help them but it all comes to naught. Sometimes the autopsy isn't worth it. In a case like this you might have needed a professional to make sense of what was going on, I'd bet it would have been very complicated.

Best wishes.

 

[Drieslag]

Thought about the postmortem for a second but not even two.

Here a picture of the chinese rooster and a link to an English report of it on youtube,

. It also mentions the cartilage disease.
It looks very similar to the cockerel I had except that mine didn't walk as steady as this one. Mine actually was nearly falling over backwards when walking.

 

[chooks4life]

Poor thing, looks like he's struggling to walk there. One of his knees keeps splaying outwards away from the body, but it's only really apparent in the shots of him walking from behind. One couldn't describe his walk as comfortable though.

It looks to me like the cartilage disease they say he 'contracted' (worrying, implies it's possibly contagious) actually progressively erodes cartilage or prevents it from growing, as his body is not normally sized at all.

Beyond the keel his body ends abruptly, not allowing for normal abdomen width or length; this could explain why yours appeared to poop out of his navel, since it looks like it shrunk the abdomen inwards. Eh, theories... Wish I knew what it was.

Another theory: the tail is somehow affected, and not by abrasion alone. This one in the video doesn't appear to have a tail. I'd guess he does but it's shrunken so much you can't see it. All the accessory structures are shrunken too, since he has no abdomen to speak of. Maybe another feature of the disease?

I notice he's got rump feathers that don't look messed up, yet he has no tail feathers. Rumpless breed or rumpless due to disease? Maybe the disease affects the spinal cord below the hip area, so everything wastes away beyond that point? Progressive nerve death with the usual wasting that accompanies it? In which case eventual inability to eliminate naturally could be a cause of death.

I'd love to see the post mortem results for the one in the video... The interior effects are very visible would be my guess. Not that I blame you for not wanting to post mortem yours, I understand that just fine.

Best wishes.