I recently culled a sick hen, and I found some pretty odd stuff going on in her intestines. She was a mutt of some kind, (she looked more like a small buff orpington) about two years old, and I don't think she'd been laying for a while. The past few weeks I'd noticed that she also hadn't been pooping at all, or eating as much as she used to. I could feel a lump in between her legs and her crop never seemed to be empty, so I decided to put an end to her suffering and find out what the problem was.
So I opened her up and this is what I found:
Her liver was good, her lungs were good, her heart was pretty good, and her kidneys, too. Her ovaries looked ok, but there were no eggs in her oviduct and none sitting in her body cavity. She felt light from the outside and had a pointy keel bone, but had plenty of gobs of yellow fat inside. Everything seemed to be in order until I got to her gastrointestinal tract. Both her crop and her gizzard were ridiculously full of dark, smelly, partly-digested food. Like, several heaping handfuls of the stuff. At the end of the gizzard is where I found the problem. Intestines are supposed to be long and wide enough to pass fecal matter, but hers looked very...small, like they were stunted or something, and the walls of the intestines were very thick and constricted in a lot of places. The duodenum was a mess, I could barely cut it apart enough to look at it, and it was scrunched up tightly. It didn't look twisted up or knotted, just small. The ceca were also very small, and not very full of the dark green stuff that's supposed to be there. I think I also may have found a small white tumor on the pancreas and more little ones on the duodenum. No poop was getting through there.
I can't find anything about a shrunken intestine like this. Any ideas on what this might be? Thanks!
So I opened her up and this is what I found:
Her liver was good, her lungs were good, her heart was pretty good, and her kidneys, too. Her ovaries looked ok, but there were no eggs in her oviduct and none sitting in her body cavity. She felt light from the outside and had a pointy keel bone, but had plenty of gobs of yellow fat inside. Everything seemed to be in order until I got to her gastrointestinal tract. Both her crop and her gizzard were ridiculously full of dark, smelly, partly-digested food. Like, several heaping handfuls of the stuff. At the end of the gizzard is where I found the problem. Intestines are supposed to be long and wide enough to pass fecal matter, but hers looked very...small, like they were stunted or something, and the walls of the intestines were very thick and constricted in a lot of places. The duodenum was a mess, I could barely cut it apart enough to look at it, and it was scrunched up tightly. It didn't look twisted up or knotted, just small. The ceca were also very small, and not very full of the dark green stuff that's supposed to be there. I think I also may have found a small white tumor on the pancreas and more little ones on the duodenum. No poop was getting through there.
I can't find anything about a shrunken intestine like this. Any ideas on what this might be? Thanks!
