Fresh Chickens Green Skinned Body Is FOund, Why?

[DottyStars]

the only thing that was wrong was half her head was missing.... but thats not something you could carry on living with.

 

[Eggs4Sale]

All kinds of questions arise:

Was the green tinge everywhere on the skin, or was it mottled?

The missing face, was it dried or fresh?

Had you seen this chicken yesterday before bed-time?

 

[Eggs4Sale]

Quote:
Half the head, or half of the face?

Actual skull broken and missing?

 

[DottyStars]

half the face was missing, seemed fresh-ish. she was also perfectly fine before bed, and her scull was intact. the green was like a pastel mint colour but bright, and was around the abdomen and bum.

 

[anngili]

Kind of. It's usually caused by one or more of the Clostridia bacteria, although I was told by my parents that the gas gangrene was usually caused by Clostridium perfringens. Clostridia germs are usually in the environment and also in the intestines of people, livestock, wildlife, etc. What usually happens to cause the actually case of gas gangrene (or other clostridia infections) is that something in the environment the bacteria are living in allows them to multiply fast.

That can be a puncture wound that has lots of damaged tissue for them to feed on and no oxygen to kill the live bacteria. It can be something about the diet or what's ingested or an ulcer, or lesion (cut/scrape) in the intestines that can let the Clostridia multiply and get into the blood stream, or even poor blood flow (which is why diabetics get it when other people don't).

The good news is that penicillin will usually kill the live bacteria quickly (at least as of the last time I heard about it). It can also usually be prevented with vaccinations.

The bad news is that even if you kill every Clostridia live bacteria in an environment, their spores (eggs) are darn near impossible to kill, so you pretty much need to treat the symptoms very quickly AND find out what caused the situation that provided a good environment for the bacteria to multiply. So it's not like one chicken will usually get it directly from another (don't know about it if they eat the flesh of the dead chicken, though); they'll usually get it because they're susceptible to it for the same reason(s) the first chicken came down wth it.

What worries me most about this case is that the rest of the chickens might be susceptible and that the dead chicken probably had the version that started from the intestines (why the abdominal area is green but not most of the rest of the chicken). I'm worried that the poop she shed might be really loaded with the bacteria and spoors and that the other chickens will be exposed to a much higher level of the Clostridia bacteria than they would be otherwise. Under those conditions their immune system might be simply overwhelmed by sheer numbers, especially if they're already being compromised like the dead chicken might have been.

 

[Eggs4Sale]

I remember a post about butchering cornish chickens, where someone said the skin was green and everyone said it was bruising. I don't think they mentioned a smell. But if you look at your hen from the stand-point of animal attack, does it match up? Are the feathers in fine shape or does she look hell-beaten? Or does she look like a normal chicken just lying there with half her face missing?

I'm wondering: If a chicken is attacked by a skunk or other critter, would that animals smell be on the chicken?

 

[DottyStars]

she just looked like a normal chicken, her feathers werent in dissaray. It definately wasnt bruising, bruises are motled and this was the same colour all over, a vivid pastel green.

and to do with the attackers smell remaining, in the case of a skunk the smell would remain if the skunk had marked somewhere.

 

[anngili]

Most cases of gangrene have black tissue instead of green and they're caused by one of the other types of Clostridia; from what I understand, only the gas gangrene cases have the green skin symptom.

I don't know why it's more rare than the others; maybe it's just pickier about the conditions it needs to really multiply. Once it gets those, though, it just grows at an unbelievable rate. From what I understand, once it gets a good foothold as an infection, the toxins it releases actually change the environment in the flesh around the infection to make it even easier for them to multiply and the more of them there are, the more toxins they release, the more they modify their environment in their favor, so that's why it can reproduce at an astounding rate and why it was so feared during wartime.

 

[Lu King]

Was the green perhaps a bite from a spider or something?

 

[anngili]

Oh, yea, it got the name gas gangrene because the bugs actually produce gas as a side effect and the wounds smelled differently than usual gangrene, which pretty much smelled like dead/rotten flesh. The gas gangrene smell is apparently stronger and stays around longer. That's what my mom told me and she'd actually treated some cases when she was young. The color of the skin you're describing matches her description, I believe. She said the skin was a bright green that you wouldn't see with anything else and that it was pretty much uniform.

(This following part is really gross even to me, so if it's not your chicken you may not want to read further.)

She also said that pockets of the gas would form in the tissue, including under the skin and that the skin would turn a bright green to a purplish or greyish green, (she thought) depending on how much jaundice was being caused by the infection. (Jaundice causes the skin to turn yellowish and in combination with the greenish color from the C. perfringens infection itself, was what she thought caused the bright green color. She also said that there would be gas bubbles sometimes right under the skin and that when you pushed on the skin a little it would have a funny, crackly feeling. She also said that the infection would produce dark fluids that looked a lot like dark blood mixed with other fluid. Come to think of it, I think she did say there was a stage were the tissue was darker, more purplish than green, but that (at least with her patients) the skin always turned a very distinctive shade of green.