- Apr 10, 2011
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Hi All. I'm new to raising chickens and I'm having a really hard time with illness in my flock. We started out with a flock of 4 about 3 months ago. The chickens were doing great and were very happy for about a month and then one evening, one of the back doors to the coup was left open (didn't know that it had been opened by my toddler since this is one that we usually kept closed). Long story short, when I came out in the morning, 2 of my chickens were missing. I think that they were taken by an owl or something because there was no sign of a struggle, just gone. We were discouraged, but I guess we learned to check the coup more thoughroughly. We bought 2 more chickens and introduced them to the flock. A few weeks later I started noticing that a few of the birds were sneezing but one day I noticed our RIR was sneezing and coughing and had frothy eyes. I called every vet with a 20 mile radius and none of them treat chickens. I called the feed store and they told me to treat them with Terramycin. I treated the entire flock for 10 days because I assumed that they were all infected. We just finished the 10 day cycle one week ago and at first I thought RIR was better but then the last few days started to make gasping noises! I had just gotten a stronger antibiotic which I was going to use for her and I was going to sequester her until treatment was over, but we found her dead this morning. Now I am panicked that I am going to lose my other 3 birds. The terramycin obviously didn't work and 2 of my birds are sneezing although that seems to be the only symptom. Oddly enough, today we got our first egg after waiting 3 months! But now we can't even eat it...lol. Has anyone every experienced this? What should I do? Lastly, I've read a lot of conflicting information about Terramycin that says that once you treat a hen, you can never again eat the eggs and then some that says wait 2 weeks, 21 days...etc. What should I believe here???
