The Story of Ella, The Chicken Who Ate Everything

[Urchin]

This is Mozzarella, Ella for short:




The picture is a pretty accurate one of her behavior, as she's a mischievous and sweet little bird. Why lay eggs in the nest when you can tip it over? She's one of my house silkies, bought to be a companion to Thunderhead, who was a bit disabled and had to inside where he could be observed. He passed on in early December last year, leaving just Ella and the two chicks she hatched out two weeks earlier. I had worried about Thunderhead's condition deteriorating, so when she went broody, I stuck a couple of my blue hen Professor Fluffle's eggs under her in hopes they were viable. They've been Ella's flock since then.

Now I had hoped to transition these three chickens to the coop with the others. How fun can it be for a chicken to live inside? My first step was to allow them to forage outside for short amounts of time. I put a small fence around their area to keep them in place. That didn't stop Ella at all. She pushed over the fence then went to feast on the hay I had wintered a flower bed with. Our poor old guinea pigs both passed on last year. I thought that was a good way to use their leftover hay instead of throwing it out.

She developed what I thought was sour or impacted crop. Honestly, I couldn't tell because her crop felt like a water balloon with a small, hard ball in it. So, I made a call to the vet. We live an hour from a university with a veterinary medicine department who has the best avian vet in the state. Plus they see chickens. I call anywhere else local and basically get laughed at. I make an appointment to take her up there.

And so it begins. It's not sour crop and blood tests show no infections. They ask if I want x-rays done. So, x-rays it is. An hour later I'm shown a full x-ray of her body, complete with egg to be laid and a nail in her ventriculus (gizzard). If it has zinc in it, she's probably experiencing zinc poisoning and the water-balloon crop is from her drinking a lot of water. Great. So we discuss options. She's not a run-of-the-mill chicken, but the kids' pet, so once I find out surgery is simple and not going to bankrupt me, I agree to an endoscopy. She spends the night at the medical center and the vet scopes her in the morning.

I get a call that they couldn't reach the nail because of all the hay she consumed last week while outside foraging. Can they try again? It would be on their dime this time because the vet wants to try some new technology, some kind of endoscope with the ability to take x-rays real-time as they actually scope. Ok, why not? All I have to pay for her hospital stay. I'm sent home with some medication to help leech away the zinc and a packet of powder to make a kind of gruel with that should help flush out the hay. Peanut butter is suggested, too. The oil in that will help things pass.

I put Ella in a kennel by herself, but near the chicks. with her gruel, some water and a blanket. She spends her time pecking in the corners desperate for anything to forage. I buy her some parrot toys to help keep her occupied, but she's only interested in foraging like crazy. Three days later, I take her back up to the medical center.

 

[ChickyChickGirl]

wow. That's a lot of trouble for one chicken, but it seems like she's worth it

so beautiful

 

[Urchin]

The vet tries again, but Ella still is full of hay and they can see the nail, but not reach it with the endoscope. All that happens in the end is the vet gets enough information to do her research paper. At least I don't have to pay for it because it's over $1000 worth of work. Total cost now is about $1200 and we still have no nail to show for it.

Home Ella goes again and is going to be on mash for a week to really clean out the hay. I think that being with the chicks might be better for her and maybe she'd socialize a bit and do more than obsessively peck the corners of her kennel. I start using the blender to grind up regular chicken food into mash for all of them to eat. The chicks took to mash just fine, but Ella's obsession with pecking everything didn't stop. I noticed her eating the sand I used in the pen and switched it out with large-sized woodchips. I didn't think sand would be a problem because she never ate it before. Maybe something about being restricted to a diet of mash caused that particular problem.

One day, she and her chick Goronzilla (Zilla) both got out of the pen. Someone left a box next to one side of it and my best guess is that they both flew over the side, landed on that box and jumped down to the ground. I found Zilla on the laundry shelf and Ella behind the washing machine. I put both of them back and thought nothing more about it. About two weeks later, we tried for Round Three, which I say is going to have to be the last round because I just can't max out the credit cards, even on a beloved pet chicken. Round Three involves going through her crop with the endoscope instead of through her mouth and three weeks on mash. Lucky Ella.

Round Three went about as well as Rounds One and Two, except this time it was sand in the way, not hay. And there was a staple, a small eraser, a rubber band and a candy wrapper in Ella's gizzard along with the nail. Guess who had a feast after her escape? I now know what lives behind my washing machine. Ella is sent home and I'm told to just let her be a chicken. Maybe the nail and staple will both pass on their own. So, I give them back their regular chicken crumbles along with scratch grain treats. I have to keep mash going, too, because PJ has decided to be a pain in the butt and not eat crumbles. After a two day hunger strike, I give up and get out some mash before she keels over. This state of affairs lasts for nine days before Ella goes broody this weekend.

She had laid four eggs after her surgery and put weight back on nicely. At first I thought she had taken a step backward, so I grab and egg from the fridge and present it to her. She immediately shoves it under her. Well, I decide I'm going to have to break her of that because losing weight right now is not an option. I fight until Wednesday to keep her from nesting anywhere she can. She got comfortable, I'd put her on her feet by the food and water. Tuesday it's a half-a$$ed kind of broodiness. She's up and around for several hours a day, so I feel I'm winning.

But that afternoon around 4:30 she takes a turn for the worst. She slows down a bit, so I keep an eye on her. Her crop is empty, so I tube feed her, hoping I don't have to take her in during the night and can make an appointment in the morning. By 9:30 she's hunched in the corner and I make the call to the medical center, thinking we're going to have to put her to sleep. My vet calls me back and says to bring her up. They'll help defray the costs because at this point nobody wants to lose her. She's kind of become famous amongst the vet students. Apparently almost every fourth year student who was assigned clinic and ICU duty came down to the Exotics Room to see her and take pictures. Also, my vet feels bad that we've had so many attempts to remove the nail go wrong.

Blood tests are done that show her white blood cell count is sky high, suggesting that the nail is embedding itself in her gizzard and she's fighting an infection. My vet says at this point its either risky surgery where they go through her proventriculus to get the metal out or we just put her to sleep. The surgery can be written off as a teaching tool because it's such a rare surgery, no intern she's ever had has had the chance to see this kind of surgery in action. Without it, the nail will kill her. With it, there's a big risk she'll die on the table. At this point, I agree to the surgery. So much money, time and effort has gone into this chicken that it seems pointless to just give up.

 

[Urchin]

Today was just horrible. I work at home, so I sat there waiting and trying to concentrate on my work. The girls were worried, too. My son had just completely withdrawn. He avoided any discussion of Ella. We even went up there last night to see her just in case she didn't make it through. He didn't want to go back and see her. The vet student took me and the girls back to Ella's cage. My oldest daughter got a few pictures of her. She doesn't look quite as beautiful now, with her chest plucked from surgery and her hard wing, tail and foot feathers all broken off. Some of her poofy crest had to be clipped away, too. She sat there all hunched over, but alert.

All day we waited for that call and we finally got it around 6:30 this evening. She had made it through surgery and was going to spend the night in the incubator to help keep her body temperature up. The nail, staple and rubber band were removed from her gizzard. A small, metal ring was removed from her crop. She was very alert, but still loopy from the anesthesia. She's on two very strong antibiotics and serious pain meds. She hasn't eaten yet, but I was told that is normal and she would be kept hydrated and tube fed in the morning. Apparently I have a very resilient chicken. She's not out of the woods yet, but she's doing much better.

So, now I have a chicken that I've sunk about $450 into and the university's veterinary center about another $1800. Had I had to pay that myself, she wouldn't be here. Heck, even what I did pay was a bit high, but it just gets to the point where everyone's invested so much time and effort in an animal that it feels like a cop out to put it to sleep. And if she wasn't a pet, I wouldn't have done this much. I would have tried my best without contacting the vet in the first place.

Now we'll let her heal and keep her away from all small inedible objects. I'm thinking we need to raise the coop off the floor or at least surround the bottom of it with some kind of wood to keep things out of it. I have no idea where the small, metal ring came from, but I suspect it was just dragged in on someone's shoe and unknowingly kicked into the chicken pen where she found it. We've been so extra careful with her. I can't afford to put her through all that again.

 

[b.hromada]

All I can say is WOW! Poor Ella has certainly been through enough. Not to mention you also and the kids.

Here's to hoping she is well on her way back to health.

 

[BlessedCountry6]

Wow, what a fighter! I hope she makes it through healthy and strong. She is beautiful!

 

[Urchin]

We brought our expensive little chicken home today. The $1800 the intern vet told me they've spent on Ella was wrong. Now that I have the final bill on her costs, her care has added up to $4028, around ninety percent which have been paid for by the veterinary teaching hospital. Without that, I couldn't have saved our pet. And like I said earlier, in the end, all the time, effort and funds poured into this chicken, just giving up wasn't an option anymore. Everyone went above and beyond for her. Round Two involved bringing the special real-time xray endoscope up from the zoo, Round Three a special endoscope head that was more rigid was ordered. The vet didn't have to offer to write off Round Four; it could have been left up to me to pay. And maybe all this is the reason I feel compelled to tell Ella's story. Because the head avian vet, her intern and all the vet students who have worked on Ella's case all cared so much and were so willing to perform miracles to save one little silkie chicken that I bought off of a teenage boy reducing his 4H show flock for six dollars. I'd expect this for a champion ACK registered dog or a purebred show cat, not an animal most people simply think of as livestock.

Anyway, my son and I made the trek up there to get her. After getting care instructions, the vet student we've been working with this last week brought Ella in in her pet carrier. She tried to get Ella out to show us her stitches, but Ella had other ideas. She was in that carrier and that was where she was going to stay. She eventually wandered out to stand there with head stretched out parallel to the floor, tail down. She tried to eat the flecks of color on the floor tiles, which was encouraging. Her "stretched out" posture didn't bother me. That's her "I'm so nervous I don't know what to do" posture that she's been doing since we brought her home. In fact, I think she spent like the first three days of her life with us in that pose. My daughter refers to her as "broken" when she does that.

Then they brought in the various items they took out of her ventriculus and crop. One small, green rubber band, one nail about two inches long and one small, flat piece of metal that looked like a very thin washer that was broken. It was smaller than a dime in diameter. They could not locate the staple, but staples do not have zinc in them, so getting that out was less of a worry. It might be that her body has already seen that staple as a threat and walled it off in her ventriculus where it can't cause problems. We talked a bit with the vet and vet student, then drove her home. My son, talked softly to her and made sure her carrier was seat belted in the back seat so it wouldn't slide around as we drove. He's not big on expressing himself sometimes, but I could tell he was relieved his chicken was on the road to recovery.




She's resting comfortably in a large, wheeled Rubbermaid container on some soft fleece. My husband drilled some small holes in the sides to make sure she's getting enough light. He also cut out the middle of the lid and put hardware cloth on it in case she decides to try to escape as she gets stronger. She doesn't move much yet, but I've been told that's ok. She's alert, and does get up to eat and drink. She's arranged the fleece into a little nest for herself and when she's feeling energetic, gets up to peck at the scratches in the sides of her container and peek out at the world. Her diet for the next four-five days is liquid Harrison's Recovery Formula that's meant more to be tube fed to a bird, but she's eating (well, drinking is more like it) right out of a dish. Her crest is a mess, but that doesn't matter. She's alive to get a messy crest. She gets Metacam once a day for pain after they tried something stronger. But, as the intern vet put it, that "made her a little too happy. She was so comfortable she didn't care about eating." She was on IV antibiotics and is now on pills three times a day. Luckily the pills are small and she sees them as treats. I approached her earlier tonight talking in an excited voice about treats and let her take the pill out of my hand. Thank goodness for that, because I'm wary right now of holding her too much. The poor thing has been through so much and is quite wary of all those stupid humans who just keep doing mean things to her. But I think she's retained some trust in me, as one of the "Treat Givers." After I got her all settled in, she cocked her head to the right so she could stare at me through her left eye, in true Ella fashion. She always does that when she's curious. Always head to the right so she can look up with her left eye at someone. With that gesture, I felt like things were going to be okay with her.

Here's a picture of my little fighter, thin, plucked (you can kind of tell where because of the weird shape to her lower breast), scraggly with a dirty crest, but recovering. She's already learned how to preen herself to cover up her bald spots and pull up the fleece on her breast to keep warm.

 

[BlessedCountry6]

So good to hear she is back home and doing well! I am shocked that with all the stress she is looking so good, even with her missing feathers. She has a strong will to live! I am glad your family is enjoying her and I am sure she is happy to be back in her home. I hope she continues to heal quickly!

 

[tridentk9]

Wow. What an enthralling story! I'm surprised she didn't try to reswallow the nail when the objects were out being shown to you. Will you be making them into a shadow frame with her bill?

If she's liked human contact before, try changing the temp of her diet to make it "special" and hand feed her small bits. Sometimes treats are treats not because they're special foods but from the social interactions. Giving it in an insulin syringe also gets her used to the idea of taking things that way. With her, it could be useful training!!!

 

[TommyDaDelaware]

Oh My!! What a Nosy little girl Ella is!! Reminds me of my Dog when he was a puppy. We had hypodermic needles out for the pigs and I come out of my room in the morning to find the Needles strewn across the floor, package open, and one is missing!! Panicking, I called my dad, dad took him to the vet and did x-Rays, but no needle inside him. Turns out one of them rolled under the couch...