The road less traveled...back to good health! They have lice, mites, scale mites, worms, anemia, gl

[Beekissed]

Bee, I'd love and appreciate a technical description of how you washed your chicken's vent. Did you lay her on her back? Did you need to wrap her in a towel or something to keep her calm (you know, 'cause I only have two hands! )? Did you squirt her with the Dakin's solution and then rub a bit to remove the old, caked-on crud or did you submerge her (and if so, how?) and maybe rub a bit, too? Additionally, depending on how wet you got her, is there any concern with leaving her wet? It's in the 50's right now and I wasn't sure if it was too cold once they're artificially soaked to the skin. One site I saw submerged the hen in a warm epsom salt bath and then used a hair dryer...necessary???

This hen used to have very mild gleet, but an earlier washing and povidone application plus a switch to FF pretty much cleared it up. She has some caked on poop so I can't tell if she has any sores or anything around her vent. I would like to get her clean, inspect the area, and then apply either povidone or nustock (I called and my feed store has some).

Thanks for any advice!
Whitney

I had help in holding and this is always a help. We laid her on her back on a clean towel, right outside the coop on top of the feed can. Forty something temps out all the while. Had my coop light out there for good lighting. Wrapped the towel over her head and had my mom, AKA The Ol' Bat, to hold her feet and the towel in place. I just had a basin of the warm Dakin's and a few rags there and just soaked and gently rubbed that caked-on area. After soaking I just kept rubbing and and rinsing until I started to see skin and healthy feathers under all that gloop. I also used a large toothed comb to comb some of the moistened crud out of her feathering.

After the area was clean, I took dry rags and dried the skin and feathers as best I could, sort of sponging it out of her tail feathers. Then I combed her again....The Bat and I were chuckling over the faces her vent was making and how much she seemed to enjoy all the attention. We were also laughing at how we never thought we'd ever be soaping up and combing a chicken's butt in all our born days....guess there is a first time for everything, huh?

After getting her toweled dry, I took pics of the clean butt and then applied NuStock right up into the vent, as well as all around the vent and any pink and exposed skin and followed that with a generous slathering of bag balm to seal it all in.

No hair dryer and with a coop that is almost completely open air at the moment(mid to low 40s)...she did fine and was strutting her stuff the next day as usual. Birds that are well acclimated to the outside temps are pretty tough and it was only her butt that was wet. She snuggled right up between her flock mates and carried on with her life. No sissy birds here!

I suggest you get help or devise a way to swaddle her, tie her feet and keep these two elements from getting in the way....easier said than done but will be some experience under your belt if you can accomplish it. Let us know what you did and how it all went?

 

[chicken curious]

Thanks!!

It's not a whole bunch of poo and it doesn't stink like gleet. Normally I wouldn't interfere, but since she had an issue in the past I'd like to make sure she's all healed up and I can't see past the dried poo. Maybe after her spa treatment (you crack me up with the comb, etc!) she'll make me some classic happy vent, unhappy vent faces.

 

[Beekissed]

I've no doubt that, whether we were to battle with either personal wit or the reputation of government entities for dispensing good/bad advice, I would easily lose ... clearly, your position is not merely set in stone, but built upon most solid foundation, and I'm standin' in a puddle of sand when it comes to all this. Therefore, I KNOW better than to start my next sentence with, "But," yet I can't .. stop ... b ... but, that's not exactly what happened here.

Before I continue, let me say that I will bookmark your thread; in fact, I'll try 'n save it for offline browsing ... the lack of structure that these forums have drives me nuts, 'cause it's hard enough for me to follow conversations w/ my low vision (I even had to hunt for a bit, just to find this text input area). Nobody's comment connects to the one it responds to, so it's gonna take me a while to sort through SIXTY-SEVEN PAGES of posts, skimming all those like this one from me, as I search to find the "road less traveled" part ... and, here come that word again ... BUT what caught my attention, creating that sense of urgency and concern I felt, was that part of the same title you've switched me with that read, "They have lice, mites, scale mites, worms, anemia, gleet, feather loss and other horrors," rather than, "[I'm not] planning on having those diseases in my flocks or even fearful of having all those poultry diseases in my flocks."

One final point, and -- honestly -- I will stop typin' and let you get back to writing what folks like me want most to read. That old saying, "Don't judge a book by it's cover," has dual meaning this time, 'cause I suspect we come from similar soils. My studies of chemistry/biology/physics/etc. most certainly hasn't caused me to become more likely to use anything that isn't, or doesn't become, completely natural -- not that, without proper balance, natural is always good. I also find many natural preventions/treatments in the four suggested resourses. In fact? There are some diseases that the only known treatment/cure *is* completely natural. And, most folks don't have your many years of experience to draw from, or that keen ability you have developed, so as to quickly diagnose poultry/fowl.

And, as you know, infected flocks can rarely afford to wait on anybody that's as ignorant [edit] as [/edit] I'm likely to be ... that's why I asked you to explain, and I thank you for takin' the time to do so ...

Yes, I think you might have missed the first pages of this story and, by just reading the title, thought to help me with my flock problems and that was very nice of you. You are new to the forum so it must have come as quite a shock when your helpful suggestions were dismissed out of hand and for that I apologize. Everyone here who knows me could have told you that I eschew the modern, accepted versions of animal husbandry in favor of the old remedies and methods.

It's just who I am and what I've found to be true. Books can only take you so far and then some real life experience has to come into play somewhere. I had never had any of these things in my flocks down over the years...neither had my mother or my grandmother. After getting this flock back from a place of horrible management that yielded horrible results, I took this opportunity to see if my natural methods of husbandry could cure this flock of all this mismanagement. It has been rather exciting to see that they DO work on those things, as I had suspected all along. I always get to live in the land of preventative with my animals and never much in the curative, so to a nurse like myself it was a challenge and a great affirmation of the effectiveness of natural cures.

The folks of this forum are pretty down on folks who want to practice natural husbandry and quite often will poo-poo the suggestions from this viewpoint as being ineffectual and sometimes even will attack the suggestions outright as being a load of horse pucky. I thought this opportunity was ripe for showing just how effective these methods and remedies can be on the more typical poultry complaints on this forum...parasites, poor condition, bumble foot, gleet, etc.

I'm glad you asked these questions because I think that needed to be clarified on this thread...this is the no meds, no USDA methodology thread. This is the curative powers of clean, natural living, healthy foods, and whatever you have on hand in your home thread. Things like ACV, garlic, pumpkins, NuStock, bag balm, epsom salts, raw honey, wood ash...these things never go out of style and never lose their effectiveness, IMO.

I've been saying it for years but finally got to prove it~albeit this is nothing I would have wished on my birds merely for an opportunity to prove it~and it will be documented right here. Folks can take it or leave it, as they see fit.

This thread was started for Catherine and people like her who are just looking for a simpler way to good flock health.

 

[chickachee]

I had help in holding and this is always a help. We laid her on her back on a clean towel, right outside the coop on top of the feed can. Forty something temps out all the while. Had my coop light out there for good lighting. Wrapped the towel over her head and had my mom, AKA The Ol' Bat, to hold her feet and the towel in place. I just had a basin of the warm Dakin's and a few rags there and just soaked and gently rubbed that caked-on area. After soaking I just kept rubbing and and rinsing until I started to see skin and healthy feathers under all that gloop. I also used a large toothed comb to comb some of the moistened crud out of her feathering.

After the area was clean, I took dry rags and dried the skin and feathers as best I could, sort of sponging it out of her tail feathers. Then I combed her again....The Bat and I were chuckling over the faces her vent was making and how much she seemed to enjoy all the attention. We were also laughing at how we never thought we'd ever be soaping up and combing a chicken's butt in all our born days....guess there is a first time for everything, huh?

After getting her toweled dry, I took pics of the clean butt and then applied NuStock right up into the vent, as well as all around the vent and any pink and exposed skin and followed that with a generous slathering of bag balm to seal it all in.

No hair dryer and with a coop that is almost completely open air at the moment(mid to low 40s)...she did fine and was strutting her stuff the next day as usual. Birds that are well acclimated to the outside temps are pretty tough and it was only her butt that was wet. She snuggled right up between her flock mates and carried on with her life. No sissy birds here!

I suggest you get help or devise a way to swaddle her, tie her feet and keep these two elements from getting in the way....easier said than done but will be some experience under your belt if you can accomplish it. Let us know what you did and how it all went?

AKA The Ol' Bat - too funny!!

 

[Beekissed]

My kids started calling her that and she loved it! She embraced it so much that she will sign cards to them from the ol' bat and even had bats on her return address labels once. We've had a lot of fun with it, especially when strangers hear us call her The Bat...but it with all the love in our hearts.

 

[7L Farm]

You know it just dawned on me. Back in the day I use to use powdered sulphur in all my wood duck houses. Every season I would clean the shavings out of the boxes & sprinkle the sulphur in the boxes to control the ducks from mites. I think I'm gonna start doing this again in my nest boxes. I never saw mites ever on the ducks or in any boxs.I use to buy the powdered sulpher at a drug store. It worked well. Just a thought. I guess you could sprinkle some on the the shavings in the coop as well.

 

[7L Farm]

I have a friend we called bat. It was back in my teenager years when we drank Bacardi rum. The bat is on every bottle of Bacardi guess its their trade mark.

 

[galanie]

Breezy, do you have a spot in your yard for a small, portable outdoor fireplace?  If burning wood is allowed where you are you can make your own wood ashes in a small chiminea (terra cotta free-standing fireplace).  I use a portable fire pit - it's a metal bowl with a screen lid, on a low stand.  I've seen them at hardware stores and garden centers and sometimes at Walmart or Target.  They tend to be seasonal store items, so keep an eye out.  You could also improvise with an inexpensive charcoal grill and some metal screening for spark prevention. 

I am also in the city but lucky enough to be in an area where we pretty much leave each other alone. I can get away with having too large a "barbeque" fire when I'm burning tree trimmings and stuff. But if I couldn't, well, I'd get out the old pit and burn a less at a time. I'm editing this because I now see that you've had burn bans. Glad to know that you don't now, breezy.

 

[Miss Lydia]

I have been on Amazon for a long time trying to decide which Neem Oil I should buy, please someone who has bought it to do their roosts tell me which is the best. Also where is the best place on line to buy the Nu stock, our closest TSC doesn't have it so I will have to buy on line, thanks so much.

 

[galanie]

Jeffers has pretty good prices. Much cheaper than my feed store: http://www.jefferspet.com/nu-stock/camid/PET/cp/4F-A1/id/300189303NUE/