The Natural Chicken Keeping thread - OTs welcome!

[Leahs Mom]

It seems the whole commercial production of animals is putrid.

It always reminds me when someone who hasn't been around a chicken coop comes over and states their surprise that it doesn't stink. It's then when I realize that...hmmm, I guess it doesn't!

I have, however, had a smell if the litter was wet around a spilled waterer (which doesn't happen if there aren't chicks in there!). So if I multiply that stink in my mind by a whole bunch and imagine smelling that every time I came into my coop - or in the garden/yard if it was spread out there - that would be pretty bad!

 

[delisha]

My coop does have an odor. My grandson said last week..*I don't like the smell today, can I leave?*. I concluded I needed to add more shavings.He usually likes the coop so I know the rain has added to the odor. I have also been adding more LABS to the coop and that might have something to do with it too...I am not sure since I do not smell it.

 

[NanaLynn]

My coop does not smell too bad, but the run does with all the mud. Part of it is covered, but with all this rain, it is all wet.

 

[delisha]

My cop does not smell too bad, but the run does with all the mud. Part of it is covered, but with all this rain, it is all wet.

How are the birds doing?

Have you found the dogs owners?

I hear you on all the wetness. My run is pretty yucky..I don't lock my birds in it this time of year, so I do not worry about it.

 

[Leahs Mom]

I fill the run with wood chips so essentially it's a deep litter. No smell so far even in the rain.

 

[aoxa]

My coop does have an odor. My grandson said last week..*I don't like the smell today, can I leave?*. I concluded I needed to add more shavings.He usually likes the coop so I know the rain has added to the odor. I have also been adding more LABS to the coop and that might have something to do with it too...I am not sure since I do not smell it.

What is LABS to the coop?

My meatie pen already stinks. I sent Susan to get shavings today. Lost two birds the first 48 hours. No more losses since. They ran out of water overnight the same night they died. I have since made multiple watering stations available.

They looked smooshed, one was under the brinsea ecoglow, and one under the heat lamp.

Boy they are heavy already. I can't wait to let them free range.

My 5 week old Naked Necks spent last night in the big barn! I couldn't believe it! All by themselves

They still have their own part of the barn with the silkies, but they decided they were all grown up lol. I have to move them all to the big coop so I can make way for the next batch of babies. My adults are AMAZING with these guys. No pecking at all. What is up with that?!

I did catch an 8 week old cockerel wing dancing a 12 week old RIR pullet. I nearly busted a tear duct laughing at him. Talk about over achiever.

Anyway.. I love watching the babies free range. I do think it is still to early and too chilly to let the meaties and Pennies out. They will be 1 week old tomorrow.

 

[jlynnet]

My sick babies are eating, drinking and moving around! I was so happy to see them dive into their food.

My coop stinks right now. Too much rain! If we can get a few more dry days, the smell will go away and we can finish the other coop.

 

[Shan30]

Well I haven't managed to catch up since our weekend away but I will.

When we got home a few birds were sneezing, now a few are gurgling and one has bubbly liquid coming from both eyes. Sending a few to the lab this week and I'm afraid they have mycoplasma.

If they test positive I will have the second flock tested and the chicks. If all are infected I guess I am about to cull around 60 birds.

I just want to cry. Never thought I would be so attached to chickens not to mention the cost of this many birds. Just seems so hopeless.

The two coops are about 200' apart and none of my Amerecaunas are showing symptoms. I hope they have been spared but we had stopped being super careful once they were older.

Has anyone been through this?

 

[chooks4life]

Quote: Sometimes squeezing makes internal ruptures that infect even worse, even in bony or tough areas. Sometimes pushing down and outwards on the edges of the wound makes things come out better, whether splinters or whatever. Your cheek is not all tissue, there are muscles in it too. Chooks also have muscle and tendon in their pads but I don't offhand know how much, just that I've seen it in there.

@Leah's Mom: I have two experiences with living near stray voltage, namely transformers. This may seem an overdramatized account to some but it was my honest experience and in fact I have toned it down a bit. Whilst being semi- aware of the dangers of 'dirty elec'/stray voltage, I am almost tempted to dismiss it, except for my experiences. I'm going to give the two worst but there have been several other experiences too, some involving human death, including family members. One was a little girl, who died of brain cancer. Another was a 12 year old boy who also died of brain cancer despite chemo. He lived directly under a pylon in suburbia for his last few years. These aren't anecdotes I heard from others, they're personal experiences.

In one, the house I had lived in up till the age of 5 had a transformer suddenly put in within a 3 metres of the house. From being vibrantly healthy, suddenly my whole family started dying. Everyone's hair fell out in clumps. Not all of it, we kept some, probably only because we moved out asap, but I remember being five and just pulling hair away from my head without resistance or sensation and finding I suddenly had two thirds less, at a conservative estimate. I remember feeling my vital organs begin to fail. I got arrhythmia. Everyone became grey and skeletal. Really spectacular stuff. Wouldn't have believed it if you told me or showed me.

Within weeks all the trees within 20 meters of the transformer were very obviously dead. We actually had to move house to avoid joining the trees. We were so weak, we staggered, or perhaps shuffled is a better term, out of that place like... Well, like any seriously ruined human does. Almost as soon as we moved we recovered, extremely rapidly. I remember feeling better literally as soon as we drove away, as we had felt every time we went off the property. I think in this case it was an unshielded transformer, or somehow more dangerous than usual. I remember dad and mum trying to make complaints about it, then giving up, too weak to do more than move like sleepwalkers as we got ready to move. It was a desperate evacuation, really.

My second experience was in another place and lasted for six years around the age of 12. This time it was the neighbour who had the transformer; he lived a kilometer away from us, roughly. It was, like the first place, a farm. He took in truckloads of cattle, sheep, etc to starve until theoretically the slaughter trucks would pick them up to cart away all conveniently empty bellied, 'so their tripe was clean'. (Or so we were told). Well, that almost never happened. His whole place was a cancer cluster, complimented by his lack of animal care, which probably had something to do with his own cancer. The paddocks had the barest haze of green over them which was an optical illusion; the animals could barely eat it because it was so short, but they got just enough to breed before they died. His paddocks were filled with skulls.

Everything just died, all the time, of many things but especially cancer, provided they lived long enough. It was a combined barrage of starvation, illness and rapidly growing cancer. Also he bought in some good lots and some almost-dead lots of cattle and sheep. I don't know where he bought them, but it was tragic. The healthy looking ones didn't last much longer than the obviously ill ones though. Guts fell out of living animals's rectums and vulvas. The dams were clogged with still live animals lying on their sides in the mud, day in day out. Some lay in scrapes in the paddocks, their tendons failed, they would just lie there and make running motions on their flattened sides for days until they died. Some began walking on the tops of their ankles. Young seemingly healthy animals, recently brought in, died of heart attacks.

I don't make any claims as to what caused some of those problems, just my theories, but the rapid and rampant cancer that affected that whole place I blame on the transformer in part, and I also am suspicious of the chemical status of the area as it was near a clay duck shooting rifle range whose mounds were built of refuse from a tip. That place bordered some of his paddocks and ours but was not close to his home. His place was actually publicly known to be a cancer cluster, we later found out. We used to catch the sheep who would desperately break into our paddock to eat, and clean the maggots out of their eyes and sinuses, which were eating their flesh, which I now believe is something some usually harmless rotting flesh cleaning maggots will do to a very weak and sick animal when all the rotten flesh is gone.

Periodically over the years the farmer would lose another of his huge pack of mutts to cancer, always cancer, and by the time we were ready to move out he was dead from cancer too, absolutely riddled with it. Literally had cancer of everything. He lived alone. I remember him once, mad but weakly trying to hoe weeds out of his paddock for the sheep's benefit, telling me he had cancer of liver, kidneys, skin, brain, eye, prostate, bowels, bones, etc, 'everything' years before he died. This was later confirmed by his son. He lay dying for days while his sole remaining dog of about 15 kept coming over our place, begging us to come and help his/her master. These dogs never came onto our property at any other time, and were always previously unfriendly, and we understood it wanted us to follow it, but he'd tried to shoot us before, so we didn't. We didn't know until his son came round after randomly visiting his dad to tell us what had happened and what he died of and how long he took to die by the signs.

The transformer was within 50 metres of less of his house, and once it went up all the trees died around it. The son moved in, really did a job on the place, tried to make a go of it, and abruptly moved out and sold up after a few months. Apparently the place was a known cancer cluster, he told us too. We'd gotten our rent cheap because nobody dared live there.

The transformer was at the end of his driveway near the road and directly across the road was a paddock that always held Herefords. All the grass was continuously grey no matter the season or rainfall and those cattle never, ever, for all the years we were there, came within half a kilometer of that transformer, even when the rest of their paddock was quite overgrazed.

We were inundated by feral cats, hundreds, because people dumped them at that exact point of distance from town, and their dogs too. There were endless ginger females which aren't supposed to genetically occur I'd been told, and they as well as all other colors of cats had their ears eaten off by their mothers and most died of cancer before even getting weaned. Those who did survive to adulthood were demented and slowly succumbed too. This was the place I mentioned in anther thread, where a kitten was born to a dumped cat called 'Queenie' (according to her collar); it was a double size kitten who cried nonstop until she ate his head off. He was an total lump of cancer, it was all through his tissues, and so were all her other litters. Interestingly she was an older cat, pure white, one green eye and one blue eye, who only began to succumb to cancer a long time after the endlessly dying younger litters of cats that cropped up nonstop. Brain cancer got almost all of them, it would literally grow out of their heads everywhere.

Skin cancer kept cropping up on our cat's ears too. I still have once cat from that place, and she stopped getting skin cancer once we moved. None of the others made it. Her son by a tom from that place we also moved out with, only to have to get him put down a few years later with brain cancer. I had just begun to dissect animals to find out the cause of death and there wasn't any animal there that didn't get cancer, from birds to rats. Not to mention all sorts of other random issues.

This second place was a no-man's land nobody wanted to rent due to the illness inherent with it. I intend to go back one day and see how it's doing. There were always corpses of all sorts everywhere, not that I think 100% of that was the transformer.

 

[aoxa]

Well I haven't managed to catch up since our weekend away but I will.

When we got home a few birds were sneezing, now a few are gurgling and one has bubbly liquid coming from both eyes. Sending a few to the lab this week and I'm afraid they have mycoplasma.

If they test positive I will have the second flock tested and the chicks. If all are infected I guess I am about to cull around 60 birds.

I just want to cry. Never thought I would be so attached to chickens not to mention the cost of this many birds. Just seems so hopeless.

The two coops are about 200' apart and none of my Amerecaunas are showing symptoms. I hope they have been spared but we had stopped being super careful once they were older.

Has anyone been through this?

I have a friend that was. It was not MG, but was basically pink eye in chickens. All the same symptoms. She had them sent off to the lab (for fear it was ILT) and it came back with conjunctivitis. It spread rapidly, and both eyes shut making some of the birds not able to find food. It was treated with antibiotics. However, I am not sure if it is a recurring infection. The vet told her it wasn't, and I haven't asked her otherwise since the initial diagnosis if her flock had reoccurrences. I should though....

Medical term for it:
Mild fibrinous exudative conjunctivitis