am really enjoying this discussion and info.
With mareks, it seems the immune sytem becomes compromised leaving the chicken extra vulnerable to enteritis, cocci, etc. I have been dosing with tumeric but have been informed of the high lead content so am reevaluating that. Can't afford high quality organic tumeric presumably lead free.....
I hear it's very easy to grow, and only a bit of trouble to dry and powder. Going to have a go at that myself hopefully.
Chooks4life, how are you using the garlic? as a treatment or as a preventitive? I am not consistent with garlic when there isn't a problem - would be interested in how you use it. I am ignorant about dosage and using too little or too infrequently is probably just as unhelpful as not using it at all?
No, even using it once in a blue moon is better than never. Thus far, I've never had to use it as treatment because I've never had a case of coccidiosis in chickens (or anything else, turkeys, guinea fowl, geese, rabbits, sheep, goats, and more). I've been keeping animals since I was a child so that's been many years now, and I take in a lot of damaged or sick infants and adults alike so it's been a wide test subject pool including some extremely vulnerable individuals.
Garlic appears incredibly effective as a preventative even if I only feed it once every month or so.
I used to be very consistent with it, until I began testing longer and longer periods without it to see how often they really needed it and how much they needed. (The answers appear to be 'not much at all and not very often' --- one clove per chook per week will show steady results but you can go longer than that between doses). Things became so smooth sailing that I became blase about disease risks to be honest!
I wanted to know what in their diet and environment was responsible for what benefits, and what was a maintenance dose rather than a treatment dose, so I've tested on and off throughout the last decade-plus with removing things from their diet and environment and replacing them later and keeping track of results.
Kelp and garlic in the diet, no pellets/mash/crumble, soaked grains, and healthy deep litter soil are probably the most important things to maintain in my experience, free ranging is also very beneficial. Altering those staples has always shown a lessening of health. (To me, paler faces is as far as I let it get before I consider it a bad trend and try to address the issue. I don't wait for problems to occur, I try to focus on prevention. I'm very fussy about face, comb and wattle color, if they're anything less than glow-in-the-dark fluorescent red (lol, ok, tomato red for hens and cherry red for roosters, in chickens of pale skin types) then I consider something needs addressing).
The only disease issues I've had in non-adult chickens thus far have been a few cases of avian leukosis virus and one case of bacillary white diarrhea. Lost the ALV cases (very acute form due to extreme genetic susceptibility) and eradicated the susceptible lines, no problems since, and saved the BWD case (honey, raw milk and slippery elm bark powder internally, and paw paw ointment on the vent for the external damage, took 48 hours to clear all symptoms).
I have not used an artificial incubator or tried to rear chicks indoors yet, which likely has something to do with it too, since that seems to be the most immunologically vulnerable way to raise them. If I took some eggs from my own hens and tried to do that with them, without using garlic for their first month... I'd consider it a probable risk to the chicks' lives and would expect coccidiosis to occur.
The zero coccidiosis rate is likely based on a few husbandry habits or other factors as well, so I'll list them just to try to cover all bases. I do believe garlic alone could account for it, though, because at some stages of my chicken-keeping years I've had everything else gone from the diet that could have helped, yet there's still been no cocci issues, even having them on pellets for lack of any other feed source.
I believe for some cases part of it's due to natural resistance, for example raising chicks or baby animals with their mothers in a free range environment, exposed to natural probiotics/intestinal fauna etc via their mothers' bodily fluids and excretions (saliva, feces etc), out in the sunshine and dirt from day one. That's all generally been correlated with superior immune systems and lower coccidosis rates in every species I've kept.
Also by preference, I try to get robust lines that have been subject to more 'natural' selection, like 'ferals' or just what would conventionally be considered neglected animals. But that doesn't account for some of my animals which have been from more sanitary, caged and even indoor environments, very conventional, yet have also never suffered coccidiosis (while in my care anyway).
I think part of the efficacy is reliant on the destruction of cocci in the soil by the garlic traces in the feces too, I've got a study bookmarked somewhere that showed it worked that way in some species or another, think it was sheep or rabbits. Maybe goats. (I really need to get all this info in one useful place LOL, I'm planning to write it up with references and post it... Sooner or later). I can't really explain how else a heavily and long-term populated place can fail to produce coccidiosis cases during breaks in garlic dosage, surely it should have cropped up sometime or another.
In some places I had neighbors with chronically diseased livestock, which I often got livestock from, and still didn't have any problems with mine while theirs were dying next door (and on my land when they could get onto it or predators brought bits of them around).
I also lime the soil of their coops and runs and other frequented areas, just using calcium carbonate (not any caustic limes), to help keep the soil healthy, and use the composting deep litter method because I found very early on that cleaning the coop all the time upset the pathogen/'beneficials' balance of all the bacteria, microorganisms, fungi etc, and of course the opportunistic and harmful ones recovered first, and overpopulated as they do, bringing their tell-tale stink, and so the more I cleaned the more often my chooks looked 'off'... Still no coccidiosis symptoms, just a negative impact.
I stopped cleaning the coops out and that pattern stopped and their health has always been quite overall stable since then. I've never cleaned out a coop since. I believe it's crucially important to have healthy soil, so if it's pretty dead-looking soil when I first put chooks in a coop, I might 'inoculate' it with some healthy soil from a bush or forest area to get it composting quickly and efficiently.
Liming and composting deep litter also make it hard for cocci to reach dangerous buildup levels in soil.
I make sure newly hatched chicks have raw garlic in their first week, generally in their first feed but at the very least by the end of their first week, and from there I generally give it to them once a week for their first three months or so, there's no hard and fast rules to follow. It has long-lasting effects, missing a week or two or three doesn't matter (or at least it hasn't so far, but I do try to avoid it just in case).
If raw or granulated dried garlic is abundantly available and affordable I'll give it to them every day more or less, they love it and visually I really see the beneficial impact. I'm very anti-pellets because they without fail appear to have quite a depressive effect on their health and much of the added nutrients in them are crap quality or it's an incomplete spectrum or too many synthetic or overprocessed ingredients. The results of feeding such processed food speak for themselves. :/
I soak their grains for them, that's also very beneficial in many ways (including financially), and as with garlic I see visual boosts to their health from that; I don't often deliberately ferment the grains though, but sometimes it happens and they like that too. Easily digestible raw foods, natural fiber, etc doesn't support the gut conditions that favor coccidiosis.
Cooked food is only ever given in small amounts, the basis of the diet should be raw for best gut and overall health in my experience. A healthy gut doesn't become overrun with really rather mild pathogens like cocci overnight, or even in a week flat. A gut that only ever takes in cooked food is a prime breeding ground for that sort of trouble. I'm looking into growing them their own bugs, lol, they're phasing out animal protein for chooks here and they simply do not do as well on vegan diets. My diet for them fluctuates with availability and it's far from perfect unfortunately. If I could I'd have kelp back in their diet, that also did them worlds of good, but it's been a long time since I could access a reliable and good quality source.
Since it's so helpful for so many things I try to feed garlic to them at least once a week, preferably more often (as often as they want if I can) but supply has been very unstable lately, I need to grow my own. Also hearing that it's quite easy. (I'm on clay and rock soil right now so I doubt it, lol. But if I get the property I'm after that will all change).
Hope this helps. If your current husbandry method isn't providing the results you hope for it's definitely worth re-evaluating the component parts and reviewing everything. I did a lot of that early on because following the conventional chicken keeping model was not providing the results I found acceptable.
Best wishes.
