Managing Your Flock and the Importance of Necropsies - Contains Graphic Picures and Video

[Shadrach]

I know very little about the medical side of chicken keeping and I’ve never done a necropsy.

I’ve been following this thread. I’ve looked at the links and downloaded a couple of the PDF documents on necropsy I found elsewhere on this site for further reading.

I have quite an old book;

Diseases Of Free Range Poultry by Victoria Roberts (ISBN 978 1 873580 78 3) which I refer to when a chicken becomes sick.

During the last three years I’ve had four lovely cocks die from what I had assumed was heart failure.
Their combs started to go purple and then return to their normal colour and then go purple again until eventually they died.
Reading some of the medical information on this site leads me to suspect that this might in fact be liver problems cause by eating layers feed.

I can’t help the dead cocks now but if I had carried out a necropsy on the first cock that died I might have been able to save the others, assuming they’ve all died from the same cause.
I’ve been pretty stupid really.
I don’t relish the idea of cutting up a chicken that I’ve become very attached to over some years, but
I’m rational enough to realise that the creature is dead and it wont care what happens to its body.

Due to circumstances beyond my control access to veterinary care has recently become very limited
and I will have to tend to many of the ailments and injuries I would have taken to a vet in the past.
I’m going to do a necropsy on the next chicken that dies from non obvious causes.


I’m still learning but sometimes it’s painfully slow.

 

[centrarchid]

Succumbing to a high worm burden can also cause the purple look to comb and wattles. Birds failing to hyperthermia also take on the discoloration very rapidly in death. Heart failure is not something I associate with any chickens outside of extremely rapidly growing meat breeds.

 

[Kiki]

I want to read some of his books now.

 

[aart]

I just read the first one, ACGaS, spurred by this discussion.
Have read many in the way past, it's great reading, thanks for the motivation.

 

[chicknmania]

I'm gonna look for the complete set, before they get too far out of print. I've motivated myself.