My chicken is debeaked and doesnt seem to be eating

[SGP]

Hi! I have an existing flock of 9 chickens and today I just got three more adolescents at the age of 18 weeks. They are Red Sex Links and I got them from a friend who didn’t end up having room for them. She got them from a guy on Craigslist who has, I am guessing by the state of my chickens, a large commercial chicken business. They are debeaked. I watched them and two of the three of them seem to be eating the food just fine, but the third one looks botched!

Her beak is severely underbited, and she doesn’t seem to be eating the pellet food. I watch her peck at it, but she is never able to pick it up and swallow it. She has obviously been alive for 18 weeks but I don’t know what to feed her!

I didn’t know she was like this until my friends gave her to us. They hadn’t noticed. We have a large fenced out area for the chickens, but we live where there are a lot of coyotes so they can’t be “free range”, but they have an area two or three times the size of my living room fenced out to wander.

I am really worried she won’t be able to eat. Is there a food that I can give her? And if she can’t eat at all is there a way to even out the beak with a vet?

Please help! Thanks!

 

[dawg53]

You'd be better off feeding her layer crumbles. Get a deep bowl and put the crumbles in it and add warm water to it, make it kind of runny and she'll scoff it up. The reason why you use a deep bowl is that the lower beak wont hit the bottom of the bowl preventing her from picking up the feed. The wet feed will be just as nutritious as the dry feed, no problem.
You'll have to add water to it through the day, the feed absorbs alot of water and can dry out.