Parasite eradication

[chickengeorgeto]

Ok, just heard from the vet. They have a heavy load of capillaria (round worm). Since the adults have it, I guess I have to treat all of them....

Do yourself and your chickens a big favor and put you entire flock on a schedule of preventive maintenance for roundworms. If your birds have a heavy worm load then the soil in your coop, pen, run, and yard are already heavily contaminated with roundworm eggs. It will then be just a very short time before you will have to go through the whole worming thing one more time, all over, yet again..

 

[chickengeorgeto]

I have no idea, but it isn't now!
Ivermectin is NOT the same as Frontline, BTW, and I'd use Ivermectin way before using Frontline on my chickens!
I try to stick with approved drugs, realizing that approvals change over time.
Mary

Approvals on veterinary drugs come and they go. This is mainly for philosophical or political reasons and is usually unassociated with their safety or effectiveness.

It has more to do with let's see whose ox we can gore, or hopefully disembowel today.

 

[trudyg]

So how do I clear my chicken pen of worm eggs? My coop is raised off the ground, 1 block high, and they all go under there to dust bathe and chill out. I have a long rake that I use to rake out poops and debris once a week, but that won't do much for worm eggs. Also, they free range in a large area, maybe 1/2 + acre. There is no way I can clean that large of an area or keep out wild birds.

I can dust under the coop with sevin and have dusted under there with sulfur powder (yellow stinky stuff for the garden). What else do I do? I guess I could make a burn pile so they'd have wood ash to bathe in, they like to eat the charcoal from my usual brush pile but it's outside their pen. I'm open to suggestions.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

Information published in 2005. Since then, withdrawal times and acceptable drug residues in eggs and meat have gotten much tougher, which is why Levamisole, lovely product that it can be, is no longer approved for poultry. Actually there's currently nothing approve that will kill tapeworms, so helpful!
Mary

That is the hope of some of the so called welfare agencies, in fact if they thought that they could actually pull it of at the present time they would ban as unsafe the use of wood chips as bedding for poultry simply because it would damage the profitability of the commercial poultry industry as well as cause many in the backyard poultry hobby to throw up their hands in disgust and walk away.

Wormal will in fact kill both tapeworms and roundworms as well as their eggs and render all kinds of intestinal worm eggs infertile.

An important additive to a cows' diet is urea. Urea is one of the major ingredients in things like bovine protein blocks, range cubes, and other beef feeds and ammenments. But when the beef and poultry industry started FERMENTING (like chicken litter was cellulose) chicken litter with cracked feed corn and fed the resulting silage to beef cows, the welfare agencies went ballistic. This despite the indisputable fact that grass and wood chips are in fact nothing but cellulose, and that erua is a big part of chicken manure and that the huge amount of spilled chicken feed and urua in chicken litter is then recycled into cow food instead of going to waste by growing darkling beetles (the most serious and destructive insect pest in commercial poultry production) as well as the adult phase of meal worms. The science is unimportant to people like this, they only believe in science if it is able to prop up or aid in supporting their preconceived biases and political notions.

cel·lu·lose
/ˈselyəˌlōs/
noun

• 1.an insoluble substance which is the main constituent of plant cell walls and of vegetable fibers such as cotton. It is a polysaccharide consisting of chains of glucose monomers.
• 2.paint or lacquer consisting principally of cellulose acetate or nitrate in solution.

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u·re·a
/yo͝oˈrēə/
noun

• 1.a colorless crystalline compound which is the main nitrogenous breakdown product of protein metabolism in mammals and is excreted in urine.

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BTW, urea or nitrogen is the main ingredient in the production of ammonia, the chemical present in chicken manure, that makes your nose burn and your eyes water.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

... I can dust under the coop with sevin and have dusted under there with sulfur powder (yellow stinky stuff for the garden).... I guess I could make a burn pile so they'd have wood ash to bathe in, they like to eat the charcoal from my usual brush pile...

Sevin is not an approved pesticide (at least not anymore) for chickens, and as far as I know sulfur is today only a soil amendment used to sweeten soil that is too alkaline as opposed to too acidic, where in the past powdered sulfur was an approved pesticide for the control of spider mites in cotton to the tune of about 11,000,000 tons per year.

Back in those heady days of our forefathers that everyone is trying to recreate today, our fathers, grandfathers (etc and so on) fed their free range hogs coal when they were penned up to be fattened for slaughter. This was to deworm their pigs and hogs. So perhaps you should go down to your local steam power plant before it is to late and get yourself a few sacks of coal.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

So how do I clear my chicken pen of worm eggs...

There is no way to effectively clear worm eggs except by treating the ground with HYDRATED lime which can be a somewhat dangerous material, but one that will somewhat sterilize the soil. That and a period of depopulation so that there are no fresh worm eggs or chicken poop being added to the soil while you wait on Hydrated Lime to work its magic.

Read up on the differences between AGRICULTURAL LIME and HYDRATED LIME. They are not the same chemical.

 

[Folly's place]

There's no practical way to kill roundworm eggs in the soil. You can add another layer of soil, remove the top layer and replace it with clean soil, or pave it.
Mary

 

[trudyg]

I cannot remove soil from under the chicken coop, so that's out. So I've been reading up on hydrated lime, but how would I do this and when? One site recommends spreading H lime in the fall, then watering it in real well. That would be doable under the coop in the fall when I can section off an area to lime and not let them on it for some time--but they're on 1/2+ acre and I dont' know that I could do the whole thing. I could do the areas they congregate most and do an area at a time ( under the coop, under and around the pine trees, the corner by the fruit trees, and then the corner by the neighbor's garden). the rest is pretty thick grass and they peck around there but don't hang out for any length of time. Now you've got me worried about never getting a handle on this. Or, do I just watch for symptoms and treat periodically? Seems like there's no good answer.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

One big problem to keeping your chickens worm free is Earthworms. Earthworms consume roundworm and tapeworm eggs and if or when your chickens eat the Earthworms the eggs are transferred to your chickens. Crickets, snails, slugs, and grasshoppers are also a serious vector for intestinal worm infestations in chickens. I blanch and sometimes almost go apoplectic when I read about people feeding their chickens Earthworms that they find or dig up in their run.

I assume that HYDRATED LIME will kill worm eggs. it is often used to speed decomposition of dead bodies like when burying dead livestock and HYDRATED LIME could be a good thing to have on hand to sprinkle on the top of dead chickens when you bury them. I recommend that the ground be turned over with a fork or tilled up then a good layer of HYDRATED LIME is spread on top of the ground then it is well watered in with a simple hose pipe. When the LIME starts working you will see smoke rising and hear hissing.

 

[casportpony]

How do you feel about doing routine fecals and treating when/if needed?