- Jan 18, 2016
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Over the past two months I have had two ducks expressing similar symptoms before passing away around four days later. Right now I have a third duck (one who I am very attached to and would hate to lose even more than the rest) showing the same symptoms. Please help!
The ducks have trouble walking and fall behind the rest of the flock. They will collapse and sit down, sometimes wing-walking in order to keep up. No foot injuries or legs pain that I can tell, but they lose weight rapidly. They still have energy and a healthy appetite and seem to pass away in the middle of the night. The second duck I tried to treat with isolation, rest, and an Epsom salt flush to remove any toxins. He seemed to be doing better after two days but then I walked in on him almost completely paralyzed on the third morning of treatment with some eye discharge and he passed twenty minutes later. He did not seem to be in pain and he went calmly.
I suspect botulism or hardware disease because that matches the symptoms, but this is not as fast-acting as those are. Those tend to kill by the second day. The ducks get around an hour or two of free-range time which they spend in the yard and our ponds, and the rest in an outdoor pen because they have a bad habit of wandering too far if they free-range all day. It seems really odd for this to suddenly be an issue when it has not been for the past two years - surely if they were eating something toxic my older ducks would have gotten into it earlier than this?
Please help! Thanks
The ducks have trouble walking and fall behind the rest of the flock. They will collapse and sit down, sometimes wing-walking in order to keep up. No foot injuries or legs pain that I can tell, but they lose weight rapidly. They still have energy and a healthy appetite and seem to pass away in the middle of the night. The second duck I tried to treat with isolation, rest, and an Epsom salt flush to remove any toxins. He seemed to be doing better after two days but then I walked in on him almost completely paralyzed on the third morning of treatment with some eye discharge and he passed twenty minutes later. He did not seem to be in pain and he went calmly.
I suspect botulism or hardware disease because that matches the symptoms, but this is not as fast-acting as those are. Those tend to kill by the second day. The ducks get around an hour or two of free-range time which they spend in the yard and our ponds, and the rest in an outdoor pen because they have a bad habit of wandering too far if they free-range all day. It seems really odd for this to suddenly be an issue when it has not been for the past two years - surely if they were eating something toxic my older ducks would have gotten into it earlier than this?
Please help! Thanks
