Found Dead Hen - *Very* Graphic Necropsy Photos

[casportpony]

stupid question but could the increase in tumors and cancer in ones flock be caused by hybrids or gmo's? I know that our modified corn doesn't have all the nutrients that some older varieties had, but is this a serious issue we should be watching for?

Increase? I think it's been a common cause of death in older hens for a very long time.

 

[Zrcalo]

"stupid question but could the increase in tumors and cancer in ones flock be caused by hybrids or gmo's? I know that our modified corn doesn't have all the nutrients that some older varieties had, but is this a serious issue we should be watching for?"


The corn we have been growing from the late 1700's and on is highly genetically modified. They just modified it the old fashioned way. 100% of all corn grown from 1800 and onward is all hybrid. The original corn the native americans introduced to the settlers looked nothing like what we use today. Not even the heritage varieties. The corn that is used to make scratch comes from many MANY different varieties. The big GMO's that are in today's corn are the exact same ones that are found all across the board. Soybeans, wheat, rice, etc. The number one gene is "roundup ready" which allows growers to spray the herbicide on the fields without killing their crops.

If anything, it's the pesticides, chemicals, and toxins from other things that are 100% confirmed to cause cancer. Most are plastics and/or plastic byproducts. That water bottle that you drink out of? More deadly than GMO's.

:/ I've studied as a biotechnician, and plastics are honestly more scary than radiation. Because.. radiation you can clean up... chemicals from plastics (especially PCB's) you cannot.

If anything, GMO's are more responsible to allergies as these are proteins that our bodies have not had to deal with ever. US and the chickens.

(I've honestly switched to using all glass or ceramic for all my water. unfortunately, no matter where we get water, it is stored in plastic before we get it.)

 

[loveourbirds]

Increase? I think it's been a common cause of death in older hens for a very long time.

older yes, but im seeing and hearing people talk about it a lot more in 1-2 year old hens. mostly in comets from my experience. I know a comet hybrid is bred for exclusively for egg production. for this reason I can see how tumors and such could have a higher occurance. but I also see it in show and hatchery mostly dual purpose birds.
im not a vet and not claiming to be, just seems to be happening to younger and more birds.
a few years ago when I first started with chickens, we had several start losing weight, eating more, decrease in egg production and this was on hens in their pullet year. we wormed them, offered grit free choice and mixed a little in their feed. eventually 3 died in one week so we had one sent off. at that time we were feeding a layer mash made by a local mill, that mill had accidently? gotten some type of corn that was developed for ethanol production and not for feed purposes. I don't know the ratio they used but that corn was the main basis of our feed, and had no nutrition.
after all of that we did switch to a commercial layer crumble and later started mixing feed grade corn, sunflower and some other items. we raise hundreds of birds a year with little or no cancer/tumor issues. our biggest problem now is we (and by we I mean my wife) noticed the chickens really liked the sunflower so she mixed more in the feed and it made them fat. we have lost a couple to egg binding.

this argument could go either way, I just was curious if anyone else was thinking the same way I was.

 

[loveourbirds]

zrcalo, I see your point and I have been a master gardner, you are right by scientific definition. but ive always heard its not nice to fool mother nature, and we have been doing that for years.

ive seen several articles on the lack of nutrition in our foods, and its not all related to hybrids or gmo's. and I also know that organic is not always safe either. one of our biggest problems has been that we just add nitrogen, phosphorus and potash to our soil as regular amendments. fact is our bodies and our animals need several micronutrients that just aren't available. we have developed plants to tolerate our poor soil conditions as a result.

I have been searching for a good seed source for gourd seed corn for a couple of years. I hear it is a lot more nutritious, and would love to try it in my flock.

as I said before, this argument can go both ways.. guess im just looking for proof of one way or another. but on a last note, I do know that if I ever grew my own corn, I would watch not to get seed for ethanol production, but for grain production.

 

[casportpony]

I don't think that's just plain ovarian cancer as it goes along the bowels/intestines. It looks like a combination of ovarian cancer and leucosis. With outright leucosis she would have wasted, though. But I haven't heard of ovarian cancer lining the intestines like the pictures show. I've had to eradicate whole gene lines out of my flock due to leucosis. Tried to battle it for too long, all without success, only managed to prolong their suffering.

On a plus note, the healthy yellow fat in such abundance generally is a reliable indicator of good husbandry practices!

Good point... I'll send the pictures to the pathologist at UC Davis and see what he says about them.

 

[casportpony]

she looks like she has a large percentage of fatty deposits.
How old was this hen? Her liver looks fine, but was it unusually large?

When I did the necropsies on some of my chickens they had very little fat on them. Then again, they had been sick for a while.

I haven't done enough necropsies to know how much fat they should have, but I thought it seemed like a lot. Liver was normal size, I guess, thought about eating it, lol.

 

[chooks4life]

I've done post mortems on chooks of mine that died after long wasting illness, and the leucosis showed as very similar to your chooks's picture, but the tumors along the intestines were bigger in my hens, possibly because they lasted for months and kept picking up between their most ill periods. One hen had black polyps on her stomach with little white globes all around the edge of it where it met the stomach... Very precise and symmetrical. Mine didn't have any fat left to speak of by the time they died. I have heard there's acute leucosis which strikes especially young chicks and kills faster than the usual adult form. I think I may have had that in a few young ones. But I didn't autopsy those, at that point I'd identified the family lines carrying the problem and was eradicating them. And they died fast, no prolonged illness there.

 

[chooks4life]

Quote:

It depends on as many factors as so many other things do... Diet, genetics, environment, etc. I don't know how much they're supposed to have either. Since I grow chooks to feed my family I try to feed them the most natural diet possible, and we've always found a fairly consistent average of yellow fat distributed throughout the body, even if the chook or turkey or goose wasn't of my breeding. (We've performed rooster disposal services, lol). The only time I've seen white fat in the place of yellow it's been in sickly commercially raised and bred birds. Hard white fat, especially in abundance, is generally a very bad thing, in humans as well as animals. Some healthy birds seem to have very little in the way of fat deposits though, I think it's genetic there. Still learning.

(About the geese I mentioned, we didn't find them good as meat birds because despite the good taste and mix of meat type and color (white, red and dark) they are too devoted to their flock members to make it as stress-free as we'd hoped. They'd notice when one went missing, and they didn't quite get over it. Not that we culled within sight or earshot of other animals, and we always made it as peaceful and quick as possible. But the geese got wary, distrusting. So we don't eat geese anymore)..

 

[Haunted55]

Increase? I think it's been a common cause of death in older hens for a very long time.

X's 2! The aflatoxins last year aren't helping much either. I sometimes wonder if they aren't slipping in just a bit more than they are claiming. I've watched my birds outward health signs change from batch to batch of feed.

 

[redrstr29]

WAITTTTT I know this thread is old!! But I just culled 3 hens with this exact same thing!!!!!!! thats nuts I got them from auction.... And they were Comets not red crosses