You might want to consider whether the treatment is worse than the condition, from the hen's point of view. My guess would be the discomfort and potential damage from handling is worse than whatever pain she gets from the foot; given it's gone on a long time already, can't that wait just a bit longer till her moult's mostly over?
The swelling had gotten much worse than it was, and my main concern is that I want to avoid her having surgery again. I'm thinking it needs to be tended to without waiting. And since she keeps plucking her feathers out, growing them back will take a long time.
My guess is that with four hands, we will be able to tend to her foot without actually holding her, just maintaining her standing up. My partner needs to drop by tomorrow evening to filter the grapes they ordered from Italy in the tank. Hopefully we can change her wrapping together then and I will see how it goes.
It sounds wonderful indeed.
Just like you said about the book on birds moulting- it helped us understand so many things we saw but only had hypothesis for.
One thing really interesting was the comparison between old varieties of trees and recent commercial ones. The older people said old varieties took longer to grow, longer to produce fruit, and did not yield fruits every year ; but once they did, the trees lived much longer, produced fruits forever, and the fruits had more different tastes. Recent commercial varieties grow faster, produce bigger fruits, are more sensitive to climate, and die much quicker.
A bit like chickens ?
Maybe you should try moult and moulting. Apple autocorrect and Google translate both say moult is the right spelling.
Oh
. Thank you for pointing that out !! Seems my phone is smarter than me !
I don’t give meat to my chickens. We don’t/rarely eat meat so leftovers are not in the chickens diet. They get a complete chicken feed (chick or layer) with only dried mealworm as animal protein. Its sort of balanced for chickens without any meat.
Chickens can be fed vegan as wel as humans can eat vegan with a few mineral supplements for a healthy diet.
On top of that , free ranging gives the chickens the opportunity to eat insects and some small animals like frogs now and then. I wouldn’t worry about giving animal proteins.
I'll begin by saying that if it works for you and your chickens, as it obviously does since they have twice the lifespans of mine, it's great, and dont change it ! No fixing something that isn't broken.
But I disagree with almost all of it, at least for my chickens, and their specific situation.
What we call a complete diet for animals, deserves that name only because of the additives.
Here are the lists of additives from the organic layer feed I give and secondly from the conventional starter feed.
I would be interested, by the way, to know if they are similar to those in your organic layer feed.
I don't have anything against most of these additives. Vitamins and oligo-elements ? Nothing wrong, but just like for humans, I believe it is better when you get them from real food rather than supplemented.
Digestive enhancers ? These are enzymes and looking at their roles in poultry food, their aim is exactly what soaking and fermenting grains does : 1. Reduce the effect of anti-nutritional in cereals and legumes 2. Promote the development of good bacterias and microbes in the gut.
Aromas ? I don't see why the layer feed should taste like grape, unless to make it more palatable to the chickens ? Suspicious, but not dangerous.
Now if you look at the additives in the starter feed, you will also find hydroxy analogue of methionin, that is, a chemical alternative to synthetic methionin.
That is how the starter feed reaches 19.8% protein. Not by the list of it's ingredients. It's not dangerous as far as I can tell reading the safety reports.
But.. the starter's high protein content is one of the main reason I give it to my chickens - to raise the global amount of protein they are getting, since the grains have less. I began introducing the starter mash as a choice in their regular daily feed when I saw how keen they were to steal it from the chicks last summer (though the chicks didn't eat it !) So basically this means I'm supplementing them with synthetic methionin, which isn't something I'm comfortable with. I'd much rather give them real food.
Sure, I agree free ranging chickens will find animal proteins on their own! Yours get frogs. Mine don't, it's too dry here, but they get the occasional mouse (or more often the organs left over by the cats
), sometimes lizard, lots of insects, bugs. But that's from March to the beginning of November. From november to the end of february there's really not much alive to be foraged once it freezes. That is when I think it would be important to give them more animal food.
My flock is diverse. I have four hens who lay nearly every day, five hens who lay two to five eggs a week (two daily then go broody, two who lay all year round), three hens who dont lay at all or less than 30 eggs a year, and two roosters. My smallest hen weighs 800 grams and my heaviest 3kg7. Their nutritional needs are not identical. If I were to give them only organic layer feed, almost half the flock would have a "complete food" not suited to their needs.
My chickens have always had animal proteins on a regular basis, sometimes more often, sometimes less. I give them scrambled egg at least once a week, usually more, and sardines at least once every other week. They used to have meat from our old neighbour once every other week.
They love meat. They go bonkers from it, even more than the eggs and the sardines. Could they do without? Yes, sure. But I think giving them meat once in a while in those months where they won't find animal protein on their own would be good for them.
Humans going vegan is a completely different subject in my view. It's a conscious choice, for one thing. The only vitamin that is absolutely necessary to supplement in a vegan diet is B12. I'm still quite sure vegans who have a diet based on a lot of different whole, real foods, will fare better than those who eat junk or refined foods only and get tons of so called health supplements.
And I wonder how a vegan human- or how any human for that matter- would fare if eating only, or mostly, the equivalent of what we call a "complete food" for our animals.
With all that said, I haven't noticed any real conclusive long term change in my chicken's health when I changed their food. My ex-batts did not live long but I came to believe they did need some commercial layer feed. I don't have proof of that. We will see if the chickens I have now do better.
. . I may just give it a try with Chipie but I'm a bit worried the result would be that she panics and flies off to nowhere !
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