Interesting. If it has such poor nutritional value why is it used as a main ingredient for so many feeds? Is it just cheap and available? I did read a study saying that it was quite easy for birds to digest compared to some feedstuffs but I would have expected lack of useful nutrition to trump digestability. Yes, manufacturers are money-hungry and if they can dupe unsuspecting new customers to their cheap crap they will continue selling the junk - whether it's soy, or non-GMO grains, DE, etc etc!!! Education, education, education is our best fight against unscrupulous businesses plus we need to stop buying any of their products. The knowledge gained from BYCers is invaluable. The old-timers are the best - the newbies still have a lot to learn of which I am one!
My flock is MS and MG tested positive. Since last year. Idiot me didn't quarantine birds from a show. Unfortunately that bars me from selling any birds but I've found symptoms to be mild enough to continue my own personal projects and breedings until I move to my own property and am able to start a disease-free flock of breeders. I have found studies that show Baytril can reduce chances of egg transmission to almost negligible (far into the >0 decimals) so I will eventually be exporting to another growing area some hatching eggs produced from medicated hens but that project is still far in the future. Regardless this male has just not been in my flock long enough to develop symptoms; issue started about week and a half ago, whatever Myco strains my flock has takes usually two and a half to three weeks to show themselves. I have a little Silkie that showed CRD symptoms 2 yrs in a row - one time we sat up with her all night she was wheezing so badly we thought she'd be gone by morning but a Baytril shot at the vet's office saved her and made her feel better almost instantly - she started walking around the office floor like nothing was wrong and going up to the vet to see if he'd give her a treat! Now that we are aware of her proneness to symptoms we know how to monitor her. Rain, cold, damp, windy, overcast, no-sun days, we especially watch her and bring her inside when necessary and so far this year she is symptom-free. But I agree with you that a sick bird stresses me more than predator issues (since we have that one in our control) but illnesses are so unpredictable. I hope you manage a new symptom-free group successfully.
Agh didn't get the Terramycin powder from work today and can't find my old stuff. There was a big long mess and my boss was sick so I had to call my other boss to run over and open up the shop so I could get feed... in a heck of a hurry and forgot the Terra. I'll get it tomorrow at work if I have to write it on my hand Sharpie to remember! I had a supervisor that stapled stick-em notes to the inside of her vest everyday to remind herself of things she needed to do. Dang! if it didn't work for her! She checked her vest every day before she'd leave work - LOL
Got Vetrycin up at the coop. I'll grab that tonight. Thanks for all your help. Sick birds stress me out more than even predator losses... but heck here I am with three in my room now that my Cornish Bantam gone got himself beat up too, and is now penned up along with the two sickly Silkies. Need to reorganize my pens, too many dang roosters fighting! Sometimes I miss the old days when I had a flock of 15. So few birds but so few problems too... managing 150 individual lives is not easy. No, not easy to have animals when you're working - which is why I waited 25 years until retirement before acquiring any birds. I told DH we can have a dog, or a cat, or a couple chickens but not all of them because we retired to a small cottage property. Would you believe? He picked the froo-froo Silkies! Had 'em for 5 yrs and never regretted it! Now the dual-purpose LF we added turned out bullies and we had to re-home them. But we did find a couple of gentle LF that get along well with the 2 Silkies - a Blue Wheaten Ameraucana (my avatar) and a beautiful gentle Blue Breda. The sweet Amer sucks at egg-laying so we won't get any more blue-egg gene layers in future but the lightweight Breda (4-lb) is a great all-round bird and a better egg-layer than we were expecting.
