O.K. Believe it or not...this eye looks far BETTER than it did before I used Frontline on this rooster!
This poor guy has had a bad eye since before he learned to crow. I introduced him to the pen with mature Buff Orpington hens before he was ready because he was getting beat up by a faster maturing Cream Legbar cockerel that I had housed with him. So...he got picked on relentlessly by the hens and had to sleep outside in cold damp conditions and he developed this bad eye which got really swollen and you couldn't see the eyeball...just white tissue in there. It was larger than a marble. As he grew the eye stayed the same. He always ate well and mated and everything but not exactly in a robust way and he never tid-bitted for the hens. Well, he was also lazy about grooming himself and lately he was getting some external parasites and a few attempts of using sevin dust didn't seem to be doing the trick. So, in desperation one day as I finished putting Frontline on my two cats I noticed a little drop left and remembered hearing that some folks put it on their chickens and I went ahead and put the one drop on him. The next day he was amazingly perky...strutting around like never before. I thought maybe his eye was less swollen but I couldn't really get a glimpse of it. I had to go out of town for a few days and when I got back I was shocked that after almost a year his eye was no longer swollen. You could see the eyeball (although it seems a bit cloudy) and there is loose, saggy skin around the eye...but it certainly wasn't the size of a marble! So...was the swollen eye the result of some sort of parasite? Were the parasites weakening his immune system so that he couldn't fight whatever it was that made his eye swell up? I just thought it was some sort of permanent damage.
This poor guy has had a bad eye since before he learned to crow. I introduced him to the pen with mature Buff Orpington hens before he was ready because he was getting beat up by a faster maturing Cream Legbar cockerel that I had housed with him. So...he got picked on relentlessly by the hens and had to sleep outside in cold damp conditions and he developed this bad eye which got really swollen and you couldn't see the eyeball...just white tissue in there. It was larger than a marble. As he grew the eye stayed the same. He always ate well and mated and everything but not exactly in a robust way and he never tid-bitted for the hens. Well, he was also lazy about grooming himself and lately he was getting some external parasites and a few attempts of using sevin dust didn't seem to be doing the trick. So, in desperation one day as I finished putting Frontline on my two cats I noticed a little drop left and remembered hearing that some folks put it on their chickens and I went ahead and put the one drop on him. The next day he was amazingly perky...strutting around like never before. I thought maybe his eye was less swollen but I couldn't really get a glimpse of it. I had to go out of town for a few days and when I got back I was shocked that after almost a year his eye was no longer swollen. You could see the eyeball (although it seems a bit cloudy) and there is loose, saggy skin around the eye...but it certainly wasn't the size of a marble! So...was the swollen eye the result of some sort of parasite? Were the parasites weakening his immune system so that he couldn't fight whatever it was that made his eye swell up? I just thought it was some sort of permanent damage.
