Hello/help please

[andy1]

Yeah it was two different eggs in the cup,

Thank you for your help.

 

[liz9910]

 

[andy1]

Thanks Liz, great to be here!

 

[andy1]

Hi ,

We have had another bad egg. I notice some 2 hens make a funny gasping noice when they breath, could this be related?

 

[chooks4life]

Hi ,

We have had another bad egg. I notice some 2 hens make a funny gasping noice when they breath, could this be related?

Possibly. To rule it out or in, we'd need to know what the chances are that the second bad egg was a missed-collection egg. If you're sure this is not the case, and if it was laid bad, it would help to know if it smells like it's decomposing... But I assume it probably is.

Are all your hens gasping? There are a few problems that cause both respiratory disease and reproductive tract disease because the cells in both the respiratory and reproductive systems are very similar.

I will find you a thread I posted info in a while back... ETA: here it is, some miscellaneous information on diseases that affect both respiratory tract and reproductive tract.

To the furthest extent of my knowledge (which isn't that far, lol) I can't recall that any of these diseases causes rotting eggs... But internal laying and several similar non respiratory diseases can indeed cause retained eggs that rot inside the hen. So you may have a double-problem. It's not uncommon.
Quote:
Respiratory diseases in particular are very serious in birds and I'd recommend treating that ASAP, whatever you think it may or may not be, linked or not to the egg problem, however you choose to go about it...

I use natural therapies so I'd be getting at least a clove per bird of freshly minced raw garlic into them every day for at least a week, personally, however in the thread I linked to you will find a forum member called 'casportpony' who can advise you on artificial antibiotics.

I prefer natural antibiotics such as the spectrum of dozens of antibiotics found in garlic, since viruses, bacteria (etc) cannot become immune to natural antibiotics as they're always unique to each plant rather than standardized to a formula; natural antibiotics including those found in garlic are proven in hospital tests to be able to defeat bacteria and so forth that the strongest man-made antibiotics cannot, so even if you choose to use artificial ones, using garlic as well will definitely help hedge your bets. Another reason I prefer natural antibiotics is because they don't harm the whole organism the way artificial ones do, but this is all personal choice and I respect that. Hope whatever you use works.

Best wishes.

 

[andy1]

Hey chooks for life! Thanks for writing such a detailed post! And sending over that link, I am thinking the dull egg comes from the stress of having gape worm, I have quaranteened the 2 hens showing signs of gasping. But I plan to worm all the hens. Then I plan to use some natural remedies described by you as a preventative method to use all the time. I was wondering if you have heard of using copper as a natural wormer, I have certainly used it with cattle but it can be dangerous in high doses.

 

[chooks4life]

Hi andy1, yes I've heard of copper being used as preventative, but as you say it can be dangerous. I have supplemented with it before, but not for years, precisely because it's too variable. I didn't have any losses or obvious problems because of it, just grew too chary of the possibility, lol. I usually prefer to err on the side of caution and didn't have a method at the time to reliably give each animal a standard amount.

Sulfur is another one that can be good to supplement with or use as a preventative but also potentially dangerous in overdose. I want to grow and test natural herbs for anti-parasite usage in their pens, feed etc in the near future.

You can get worthless specimens of herbs that look, smell and taste identical to their medicinally valuable contemporaries, just because one is a commercial cultivar and the other is not. Better to test them than just assume the species will perform as it used to before we began breeding for commercial, economically driven traits.

One place you can get bulk herbs of high quality is from herbalists or supplementary shops, online or 'brick and mortar', which specifically supply horses. Generally they'll also mail it out.

My experience with the horse industry is that they do not generally fool around with low quality, unlike so many other animal industries, where just about any shoddy dealer can open shop and get away with selling sub par crap for years before the backlash hits or they become bankrupt through customer drought.

Those shops selling bulk herbs for horses have a fair bit more riding on their quality than most other shops selling herbs for whatever other species. Just my experience, I'm sure it's not true across the board, generalizations never are.

In the near future I'm intending to patronize a shop known as Country Park Herbs, myself. You get a 5 kg bucket of dried, granulated garlic for under $40, works out at less than $8 per kg, and being dried it's concentrated and won't take as much weight wise as raw garlic to supplement the same sulfur levels, and since it's for my rather small current flock it'll last for ages. I'll still use fresh raw garlic for certain issues of course. I also intend to buy some bulk herbs from them for my other livestock. I used to use garlic from China until my chooks decided never again. I didn't tell them about the Fukushima incident, don't know who did LOL! But, it was soon after that incident that they permanently went on strike about Chinese garlic, which was sometimes around $2 a kg. So I'm looking for alternatives, and Country Park will do until I am settled in a location where I can grow my own garlic etc.

Best wishes.