Post Injury Care Advice?

[koakritters]

I am hopefully adopting a little 2 month old hen that came into our local animal shelter that I volunteer with a broken leg and all the skin gone off the top of her head down to the bone. They were going to euthanize her today but I convinced them to fix her and I would take her so she's going into surgery tomorrow to see what they can do.

How does one care for a chicken with these injuries? She's a super sweet little girl loves to be held and pet and eats out of my hand, she spent the day preening herself and chirping at us while we worked. She deserves to have a chance to live another 10 years!

 

[Judy]

I'm sure the people doing her care can offer advice on this. She would just need the kind of supportive care anyone does: keeping the wound clean and watching it for problems, good nutrition and hydration, rest, etc. She will need to be indoors or have a good wound covering to keep flies out of the wound.

The only precaution specific to chickens that I know of is, don't use any topical preparation with a "caine" drug in it, such as cetacaine, benzocaine, etc. Birds are very sensitive to these drugs and can readily die from a relatively small dose, which for them is an overdose.

From our medication sticky in emergencies:

Aspirin - for pain relief. Dosage is approximately 25 mg per pound of chicken's body weight each day (A standard baby Aspirin is 80 mg, and a standard adult Aspirin pill is 325 mg). This information is from the Poultry Podiatry website. Warning: aspirin thins the blood and should not be used if internal bleeding is suspected or in cases where a wound will not stop bleeding.