my chickens are pecking my little 4 month old wyandotte what do i do ????

[issy2760]

so one day i got home from school and i saw my wyandotte with blood near the tail feathers and at first i thought she was pecking her self then i relised that the others where pecking her what do i do?????

 

[MsBagawkbagawk]

Separate her immediately. Chickens WILL peck open wounds, which could lead to infection and.........worse. If she has a minor wound you can treat it yourself. You'll need:

• Paper Towels
• Towels or soft rags
• A bowl of warm water
• Hydrogen peroxide
• Q-Tips
• Neosporin (Original, not the pain killer kind)
• Scissors

Set down a towel on a flat, smooth place like a table or even the floor. This is just to keep from making a mess or if the chicken poops. If she won't stand still, you can give her a little food to distract her.

Use the scissors to *carefully* trim back feathers if they're in the way. Try to avoid this if you can though. Especially since it's getting colder in most places, chickens need all their feathers to keep as warm as possible, but trim a few if you must. It will be worth it if the feathers will only get stuck in the wound and make it worse.

Wet your paper towel or a soft rag. Use this to clean any dried blood or soak up any fresh blood.

Squirt some Hydrogen Peroxide on the wound. Only do this once, because it will inhibit healing by also killing the good, repairing cells. Let it bubble away any dirt then wipe it away.

Clean the wound again with a fresh wet paper towel/rag.

Use the Q-tip or your finger to put some Neosporin on the wound.

If you want you can wrap it up, but this isn't necessary. I don't. Usually it's hard to find a way to wrap it well, and it will just trap moisture, get dirty, and need to be changed often.

There is a product you can buy to keep the other chickens from pecking her, but I can't recall what it's called. Separate her for a few days while it heals, then reintroduce her.

Hope this helps!

~~Ms. B

 

[WalkingOnSunshine]

Chickens instinctively peck at red, so once one opens up a wound on another bird, the whole flock will start to peck at that spot.

Unless it's all crusted with poo, you don't really have to do all the steps above. You could just spray it with BluKote and be done. Heck, I wouldn't do all that doctoring on my two year old if she had a cut--I'd wash it, slap a band-aid on it and be done.

I would put pinless peepers on the rest of the flock. Pecking gets to be a habit, and peepers will help to break that habit. You also might want to figure out why this happened in the first place--is there too much light at night, is the coop too small, do they need more protein, is the Wyandotte much younger than the rest, etc. Then you can resolve the problem so you don't have pecking in the future.