- Jul 13, 2012
- 7
- 0
- 7
Good morning. I'm new here - my daughter, Hopechick, joined several weeks ago and I thought this would be a good place to come with questions about a chicken we are currently nursing.
We had a terrible attack in the coop on Sunday morning - 6 of our 9 chickens were killed outright. 2 of the survivors were too badly wounded to make it.
We now have our one survivor in a large dog crate in the house. She is doing very well in most ways - both eyes are now open and the marks on her face and comb are fading. She is up and acting like a chicken as well. Our one remaining concern is her beak. It has a split down one side of the lower beak, parallel to the tongue, if that makes sense. She is unable to close her beak completely, though she is closing it much more than she did a few days ago. We are putting a vitamin/penicillin treatment in her water so she is getting some nourishment, but so far she has not been able to grab food with her beak at all. We even put a bug in her cage and she had fun poking at it, but couldn't pick it up. I have managed to get a few pieces of feed far enough into her beak for her to swallow it, but she is highly resistant to this!
My questions are:
1. How long can this vitamin solution sustain her?
2. Should I be more forceful at getting food into her beak?
3. I have heard that chickens will learn to eat in spite of a cracked beak - will the fact that she can't quite close it make this more difficult/impossible?
4. How long does it typically take for a chicken to adjust after an injury like this?
5. Is there anything else we can do to help her recovery?
Thank you so much for any help you can give. This is our first experience with raising chickens and we've only had them since last fall. Having only 9 they were pretty much like pets to us, so we really want Mabel to survive. We plan to get the coop fixed and more secure and get some more layers next month, at which time we hope Mabel will be well enough to go back out to the coop with her new friends.
We had a terrible attack in the coop on Sunday morning - 6 of our 9 chickens were killed outright. 2 of the survivors were too badly wounded to make it.
We now have our one survivor in a large dog crate in the house. She is doing very well in most ways - both eyes are now open and the marks on her face and comb are fading. She is up and acting like a chicken as well. Our one remaining concern is her beak. It has a split down one side of the lower beak, parallel to the tongue, if that makes sense. She is unable to close her beak completely, though she is closing it much more than she did a few days ago. We are putting a vitamin/penicillin treatment in her water so she is getting some nourishment, but so far she has not been able to grab food with her beak at all. We even put a bug in her cage and she had fun poking at it, but couldn't pick it up. I have managed to get a few pieces of feed far enough into her beak for her to swallow it, but she is highly resistant to this!
My questions are:
1. How long can this vitamin solution sustain her?
2. Should I be more forceful at getting food into her beak?
3. I have heard that chickens will learn to eat in spite of a cracked beak - will the fact that she can't quite close it make this more difficult/impossible?
4. How long does it typically take for a chicken to adjust after an injury like this?
5. Is there anything else we can do to help her recovery?
Thank you so much for any help you can give. This is our first experience with raising chickens and we've only had them since last fall. Having only 9 they were pretty much like pets to us, so we really want Mabel to survive. We plan to get the coop fixed and more secure and get some more layers next month, at which time we hope Mabel will be well enough to go back out to the coop with her new friends.
