I think my chicken is dying - help?

[janinepeters]

Bumblefoot will not cause sickness. It comes from roosting above hard ground and the individual hitting the hard ground coming off the roost. The foot becomes bruised and then develops bumblefoot. Prevalent in cooped heavy breeds,also overweight older fowl. I have raised American Games for 40 years and never had bumblefoot on free range of fowl in pens where the ground is soft. I have treated bumblefoot by cutting out the corn, soaking the foot in kerosene, and wrapping it in a cloth. It is a time consuming ailment to produce a cure, but it works. It appears your fowl caught a infection and needs antibiotics immeadiately. Good luck, but the chances are not good.

I don't think this is right. I believe bumblefoot is an abscess, which occurs after the bird gets a cut on the foot, and the cut becomes infected. At first the abscess is soft and full of pus, but eventually a hard kernel can form within it. While still soft, it can sometimes be cleared by soaking alone, but if a hardened kernel has formed, it must be excised, to fully clear the infection. As with any other type of abscess, there is the chance that bacteria can get out of the abscess and into the blood stream, resulting in a systemic infection, and, if untreated, death.

 

[yo burrill]

x2 Bumble foot is a Staph infection that invades the foot through an abrasion to the bottom of the foot. Yes cooped birds are more prone only because they sit on the same size perch every night putting pressure on the same spot on the foot every night and are on footing that has been exposed to poop and the staph bug continuously. Chickens do not produce pus due to infection like mammals do, they produce a cheesy substance that then can harden into the corn you find in bumble foot. As we all know Staph is resistant to nearly all antibiotics now. So is very hard to get rid of. Given time it will invade the bones and the blood stream of the bird and cause a body wide infection called sepsis. Friend of mine got a staph infection after abdominal surgery they had to leave his incision open and pack it with bleach soaked gauze for months till it finally killed all the Staph and healed.

 

[CluckyCluck]

Her bumblefoot was a lucky case I suppose. What I believe happens in some instances as with my bird, is maybe something gets pushed up into their foot causing an indent - day after day the dirt keeps pushing up into there, and maybe after the skin can not be stretched any longer it then penetrates the skin and starts to grow inside.

My chicken - I was able to pick it out - it had not actually made a hole in her skin - but it was on the stretchy part of her foot between her toes and so I got it before it penetrated the skin. It was hard and black - and smelled. But there was no hole in her skin at all.

What's wrong with her though is her other leg. She must have bruised it real bad, or maybe broke it. She finally stood up yesterday for the first time after I gave her some homeopathic remedy. Today she ate some rigatoni. Tomorrow hopefully she'll be even stronger.

She even layed an egg today!!! A long skinny one with some cracks in it - what an amazing girl she is. I guess I'll name her Hope.

 

[PoultryGirly]

Awesome!!! I hope Hope (

) will be okay!
Can you post a pic of the egg?

 

[LaynaDon95]

Glad to hear she's doing better!

 

[yo burrill]

Sounds like two unrelated issues then. If she is a young pullet just starting to lay they can have issues getting the internal plumbing working correctly. Keep an eye on her eggs they should start looking more normal each day. She should lay at least every other day. Make sure she has a good layer pellet or access to oyster or ground up egg shells for the calcium. Glad she is looking better today!!!

 

[CluckyCluck]

Awesome!!! I hope Hope (

) will be okay!
Can you post a pic of the egg?

I threw it away yesterday morning. Weird cause I was going to take a picture of it!! If I get another one, I will post it for sure. She's the biggest egg layer and while I was really surprised to see she even layed an egg - it was even more bizarre to see it oblong and not oval.

Today she ate some cheerio's and milk - some crumbles, and tonight I'm going to try rice. I think it's high in calcium - and she did pick at a bite or two of oyster shells - but not much.

I'm not sure where exactly she's hurt, so I don't know what to wrap up. She's healing though, I believe.