Six years on, information relating to the OP's question has gotten somewhat better. For one, fenbendazole has been approved and labeled for
A poultry usage (immature turkey poults).
Safe-guard's turkey dosage guidelines
The page includes a handy-dandy calculator by which to determine the correct amount of 0.5% fenben pellets to add to a 50-lb bag of feed
as the sole ration:
2.56 oz = 2 oz, 9 drams = 72.5 grams
In other words, you
can mix these pellets into chicken feed to deworm chickens-- you don't "have to" get the liquid or paste forms of safe-guard-- but to do so effectively you're going to have to get creative. The above recommendation for turkey poults is only a starting point. The backyard chicken fancier has additional considerations:
1) Will the treated chicken feed be your flock's
sole ration? If they also wander freely into the woods and forage as mine do, they'll eat less feed, so to give them the same mg/kg dose per day you'll need to increase the proportion of medicated pellets mixed into their feed.
2) Safe-Guard's guideline is for
rapidly growing turkey poults grown as meat birds on turkey farms. These birds are hatchlings in the spring that dress out at 20 pounds by October. We're talking FREAKY growth. So they're just ravenous all the time. They never dust-bathe or bask in the sun, they don't have time; all they do during those 4-5 months is eat their hearts out all day every day. At 12 weeks they're the size of big adult chickens and eat HALF THEIR BODY WEIGHT (5 pounds) in feed per day, ergo dose at 7.25 grams of pellets / 36 mg fenbendazole per day. Meaning a 10-lb turkey poult eats many times more feed per day than a 10-lb mature laying hen or rooster--
but you still want to give the hen / rooster 7.25 grams / 36 mg fenbendazole per day. So again you need to increase the proportion of medicated pellets in the feed, this time even more drastically. My adult chickens eat maybe 4 oz of feed per day per bird, at most, so fenbendazole needs to be 20 times more concentrated in the feed.
Based on the above, I medicate feed with 0.5% pellets by mixing two 1-lb packages of the pellets into 50 lbs of feed. I put half of this feed into their range feeder for the first treatment, then a week later they get the second half.
she really looks like she is doing much better.
