Oatsy 🥚

[Chickenfriend44]

These are pictures of one of my hens, Oatsy, who passed away earlier this month. We don’t know why she died. She was at least 4 years old, healthy, happy, no other problems (heart, etc.) Can anyone help me find out what she might’ve died from? I will answer any further questions! Thank you so much

 

[azygous]

I'm so sorry for your heartache. I know how much you miss her because I have a whole slew of chickens that have died from my flock and it still makes my heart hurt to remember them.

But it's hard enough to try to figure out what's making a live chicken sick. A dead chicken, unless it just died today, is impossible since all the clues died with the chicken.

When a chicken dies, if you refrigerate the body, you can locate a lab to do a necropsy. They look at everything inside the dead chicken and look at blood and other fluids under a microscope. This is the only way you can know why a chicken died.

If your Oatsy became very sick very suddenly, she could have been poisoned. If she had been acting sick for a while before she died, it could have been an infection. Chickens that free range and scratch in compost sometimes encounter lethal bacteria and die from it. This happened to a young hen of mine.

Older hens are subject to reproductive disorders such as egg yolk peritonitis and salpingitis, both infections of the reproductive tract. They can also develop cancer in these parts. All of these things are usually not curable.

If she were alive, we could examine her poop and monitor her crop and we might even find she has a stuck egg in her that we can help her pass by giving her calcium to help the contractions.

But now there's no help for Oatsy. Nor can we ever know what killed her. But we're always here to help you if you ever have a sick chicken again.

 

[Chickenfriend44]

I'm so sorry for your heartache. I know how much you miss her because I have a whole slew of chickens that have died from my flock and it still makes my heart hurt to remember them.

But it's hard enough to try to figure out what's making a live chicken sick. A dead chicken, unless it just died today, is impossible since all the clues died with the chicken.

When a chicken dies, if you refrigerate the body, you can locate a lab to do a necropsy. They look at everything inside the dead chicken and look at blood and other fluids under a microscope. This is the only way you can know why a chicken died.

If your Oatsy became very sick very suddenly, she could have been poisoned. If she had been acting sick for a while before she died, it could have been an infection. Chickens that free range and scratch in compost sometimes encounter lethal bacteria and die from it. This happened to a young hen of mine.

Older hens are subject to reproductive disorders such as egg yolk peritonitis and salpingitis, both infections of the reproductive tract. They can also develop cancer in these parts. All of these things are usually not curable.

If she were alive, we could examine her poop and monitor her crop and we might even find she has a stuck egg in her that we can help her pass by giving her calcium to help the contractions.

But now there's no help for Oatsy. Nor can we ever know what killed her. But we're always here to help you if you ever have a sick chicken again.

Thank you very much. It truly hurts. It just makes me crazy that I don’t know what killed her because- well, here’s the story: One night, when I was going outside to put the girls away in their coops, I realized Oatsy wasn’t in her coop. (They go in on their own) So I started searching the backyard to see where she could have possibly gone, when, I saw her.. Lying on the ground with her head to the side, and orange stuff around and inside her mouth. I think she got poisoned but I don’t know how. So it makes me crazy..

 

[Chickenfriend44]

I'm so sorry for your heartache. I know how much you miss her because I have a whole slew of chickens that have died from my flock and it still makes my heart hurt to remember them.

But it's hard enough to try to figure out what's making a live chicken sick. A dead chicken, unless it just died today, is impossible since all the clues died with the chicken.

When a chicken dies, if you refrigerate the body, you can locate a lab to do a necropsy. They look at everything inside the dead chicken and look at blood and other fluids under a microscope. This is the only way you can know why a chicken died.

If your Oatsy became very sick very suddenly, she could have been poisoned. If she had been acting sick for a while before she died, it could have been an infection. Chickens that free range and scratch in compost sometimes encounter lethal bacteria and die from it. This happened to a young hen of mine.

Older hens are subject to reproductive disorders such as egg yolk peritonitis and salpingitis, both infections of the reproductive tract. They can also develop cancer in these parts. All of these things are usually not curable.

If she were alive, we could examine her poop and monitor her crop and we might even find she has a stuck egg in her that we can help her pass by giving her calcium to help the contractions.

But now there's no help for Oatsy. Nor can we ever know what killed her. But we're always here to help you if you ever have a sick chicken again.

By the way, the next thing you say, I might not see because I’m going to sleep

 

[azygous]

Yes, you can be pretty sure that Oatsy was poisoned. I've also had hens die that way, and yes, it's an awful experience finding your hen that way.

I discovered the hard way that insecticide use is 100% not allowed when you have chickens. One hen of mine was poisoned when she drank out of a puddle under a planter where I had sprayed some cut worms in the dirt. I had watered and the insecticide leached out of the dirt and settled in the water puddle. No chicken will pass up a puddle to drink out of.

The hen that died of poisoning that was similar to how Oatsy died had been dirt bathing under the coop when the rooster somehow knocked over a can of wasp spray and it sprayed her right in the face. She had the yellow/orange substance seeping from her beak.

Another hen of mine ate some sand where I had sprayed some cooking oil to experiment with trying to control the dust in the run. It was a tiny test patch, but the spray bottle had some residue of pain thinner, just a few drops, and that's all it took to kill her.

So, I have three such hens that died of poisoning due to my ignorance. They died so I could learn the hard lessons and come here and share my experiences and save other chickens from similar fates.

 

[Chickenfriend44]

Yes, you can be pretty sure that Oatsy was poisoned. I've also had hens die that way, and yes, it's an awful experience finding your hen that way.

I discovered the hard way that insecticide use is 100% not allowed when you have chickens. One hen of mine was poisoned when she drank out of a puddle under a planter where I had sprayed some cut worms in the dirt. I had watered and the insecticide leached out of the dirt and settled in the water puddle. No chicken will pass up a puddle to drink out of.

The hen that died of poisoning that was similar to how Oatsy died had been dirt bathing under the coop when the rooster somehow knocked over a can of wasp spray and it sprayed her right in the face. She had the yellow/orange substance seeping from her beak.

Another hen of mine ate some sand where I had sprayed some cooking oil to experiment with trying to control the dust in the run. It was a tiny test patch, but the spray bottle had some residue of pain thinner, just a few drops, and that's all it took to kill her.

So, I have three such hens that died of poisoning due to my ignorance. They died so I could learn the hard lessons and come here and share my experiences and save other chickens from similar fates.

That sounds awful! I'm so sorry. We sometimes give our chickens leftovers, never rotten, of course, but we might have accidentally given them rotten food. But if we did, then why didn't the other chickens die or get sick, you know?

 

[azygous]

For the same reason two people can go to a gathering where there's a lot of coughing and sneezing going on and only one gets sick -Immune system and just being in the exact wrong spot.

But your description of the yellow discharge is indicative of petroleum distillate poisoning. Also, if she died suddenly, being well one moment and dead the next, you can pretty much assume poisoning, not a bacterial infection which usually takes around 24 hours for the most lethal bacteria to kill and perhaps she ate the contaminated substance and the others didn't.