Quote: As you will probably see in future you cannot see into a chicken's stomach from in front of it. That's the crop.
Chickens do fine without crops. If you stitch it closed she should keep it, if not she'll lose it, but crops aren't that vital at all. I had two chickens lose their crops to fox attack. This is why you need to mesh with finer mesh than just standard chicken wire because one fox will scare them from one side of the cage while the other waits for their chests to be up against the mesh on the opposite side. The standard chicken mesh allows a fox to grab a crop or head.
My rooster and hen who lost their crops had different severities of injury but got the injuries from the same foxes at the same time: he was torn from wattle to chest, crop completely missing, throat opened for the whole length. I found him about two days after it happened. He'd been without water for all that time. Same for the hen. When he drank, water dribbled out of his neck and chest in various places. Because his eyes were bright I decided not to cull him even though I could see into his windpipe; he was breathing out of a completely severed trachea sticking out of his chest. Because water also came out of his chest (it trickled along his mess of an opened throat clinging to the flesh and thereby got into his mess of a chest) I assumed he could perhaps drink enough to live, so I applied Pine Tar and left him to it. A day or two later he had gangrene, beautiful shades of green and blue and purple. I again applied pine tar, pushing it into the wounds, and left him to it. He was fine after that. Healed up perfectly asides from missing wattles and now you'd never know he had his throat torn completely open and has no crop. In fact, he was stolen from me last year. He sure did look fine.
The hen had the majority of outer layers of her crop removed and I could see the grain pieces perfectly through the seethrough layer left. I applied vaseline and Lucas's Pawpaw Ointment in the hopes of recovering the skin as I'd done before with a skinned-to-the-muscle-legged chick, but the crop lacked the blood vessels to live and died. It sloughed off. Once I saw it was drying out and dying, I pine-tarred it (which in retrospect I should have done in the fist place) and she was left with a shrinking hole which sometimes lost bits of her food for her, but closed more and more daily, until it was invisible and all feathered over perfectly like the rooster.
Pine tar, aka Stockholm tar, is incredible, and as long as I keep animals I intend to keep that tar on hand. It's an incredible instant pain reliever and kills infections from gangrene to golden staph. It kills scaly leg mites, fixes injuries that are otherwise fatal. And in its wake it leaves perfectly healed flesh, scarless! It's incredible. There's a reason it was historically used by horse keepers, what with horses being so prone to terrible scarring and infection. I use it for myself and all my animals. I used it to treat a spinal cord infection in a dog-bitten cat, I used it to remove a piece of glass from my foot that was in the muscle, I used it to remove a green cyst from a turkey's wattle, I used it on a little girl covered in flesh-eating 'school sores' that had rampaged undefeated for over half a year.
Chickens do fine without crops. If you stitch it closed she should keep it, if not she'll lose it, but crops aren't that vital at all. I had two chickens lose their crops to fox attack. This is why you need to mesh with finer mesh than just standard chicken wire because one fox will scare them from one side of the cage while the other waits for their chests to be up against the mesh on the opposite side. The standard chicken mesh allows a fox to grab a crop or head.
My rooster and hen who lost their crops had different severities of injury but got the injuries from the same foxes at the same time: he was torn from wattle to chest, crop completely missing, throat opened for the whole length. I found him about two days after it happened. He'd been without water for all that time. Same for the hen. When he drank, water dribbled out of his neck and chest in various places. Because his eyes were bright I decided not to cull him even though I could see into his windpipe; he was breathing out of a completely severed trachea sticking out of his chest. Because water also came out of his chest (it trickled along his mess of an opened throat clinging to the flesh and thereby got into his mess of a chest) I assumed he could perhaps drink enough to live, so I applied Pine Tar and left him to it. A day or two later he had gangrene, beautiful shades of green and blue and purple. I again applied pine tar, pushing it into the wounds, and left him to it. He was fine after that. Healed up perfectly asides from missing wattles and now you'd never know he had his throat torn completely open and has no crop. In fact, he was stolen from me last year. He sure did look fine.
The hen had the majority of outer layers of her crop removed and I could see the grain pieces perfectly through the seethrough layer left. I applied vaseline and Lucas's Pawpaw Ointment in the hopes of recovering the skin as I'd done before with a skinned-to-the-muscle-legged chick, but the crop lacked the blood vessels to live and died. It sloughed off. Once I saw it was drying out and dying, I pine-tarred it (which in retrospect I should have done in the fist place) and she was left with a shrinking hole which sometimes lost bits of her food for her, but closed more and more daily, until it was invisible and all feathered over perfectly like the rooster.
Pine tar, aka Stockholm tar, is incredible, and as long as I keep animals I intend to keep that tar on hand. It's an incredible instant pain reliever and kills infections from gangrene to golden staph. It kills scaly leg mites, fixes injuries that are otherwise fatal. And in its wake it leaves perfectly healed flesh, scarless! It's incredible. There's a reason it was historically used by horse keepers, what with horses being so prone to terrible scarring and infection. I use it for myself and all my animals. I used it to treat a spinal cord infection in a dog-bitten cat, I used it to remove a piece of glass from my foot that was in the muscle, I used it to remove a green cyst from a turkey's wattle, I used it on a little girl covered in flesh-eating 'school sores' that had rampaged undefeated for over half a year.
