Retarded/Mental baby chick?

[alpacachicken]

I saw this forum when I was querying about my silkie acting retarded. How do you know how much motrin and vitamin b to try and is it just a drop of children's vitamins and a drop of vitamin e. I want to use the correct dosage.

 

[Shiniguro]

One theory I have: From my experience - this problem usually fixes in a few days. It is caused by the baby bird not having strong neck muscles when leaving the shell. Birds that open the shell by themselves will not have this problem but when birds are assisted they can sometimes swing their heads side to side and when they try to move they end up doing flips, cartwheels and flopping all over the place. The biggest issue is feeding them. If fed good food - from my experience - they heal 100%.
The longer the neck, the more prone they are to this. Therefore ducks will get it more than chickens.

Now for truly retarded birds, that's another issue. Usually those birds do not survive very long (trampled or freeze due to getting wet and not sleeping with the other birds) UNLESS they are pampered in the incubator for longer and hand fed. Sometimes blood loss during birth can cause lame legs or impaired vision. Other things such as extreme temperature swings, not moving the egg in the ideal way and just plain bad luck with the genetics can cause this.

The law, where I live, requests that lame, weak and deformed birds should be suffocated in a plastic bag or gassed. I do not like to kill my birds and so I try my best to care for even the retarded ones. I've only had 1 bird that was truly retarded. Sure, it might be more humane to kill the bird...for me, I know it will be a lot of work but I hope that even the retarded ones can enjoy life.

Update: The way I see it, these birds would not have survived without human intervention.