Top Ten List

[ruth]

O.K. - Everytime I think I've done something I never thought I would ever do, I get to do another - today it was stitching up a chicken. The last two months have been particularly interesting.

Here's my Top Ten List of Things I Never Thought I Would Be Doing - Feel free to add your own list:

1. Sew up a chicken's neck where the roosters had ripped it open from the back of comb all the way down to shoulder blades. Neck bone was sticking out. Today I sewed her up and treated her as best possible.

2. Open up a chicken's foot and remove bumble foot.

3. Go up a chicken's vent and remove egg bound egg.

4. Drain a chicken of Ascities, fluid build up, using needles.

5. Treat a crook neck chick by hand feeding daily.

6. Give chickens penicillin shots daily.

7. Wrapping ducks wings to treat Angel Wing.

8. Soak a chicken in Epsom bath soak.

9. Help chicks/ducks hatch by picking away shell.

10. Owning chickens.

I told my DH "Just call me Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman".

 

[chickenlisa]

I was all ready to
1)try cleaning out my hen's burst, oozing crop a month ago. It was gross, dirty, huge, and ruptured.We had to take my daughter to camp, and I told her that when I got home, I'd try to clean it out, and disinfect it, and sew it up myself if possible. I found her dead in the coop by the time we got back home. Poor thing...I would have tried it too. My daughter called her Miss Prissy...not knowing there is a Miss Prissy on board here! Miss Prissy didn't suffer long we think, she hadn't had that rupture in the morning when we saw her, just a very large crop that I had kept massaging and trying to drain.
2) Hanging a hen upside down and massaging her crop fits on a list of things I never thought I'd be doing.
Also,
3)repairing a young hen's broken femur and toe. I went online to see how to do it, and I did it. She's over a year old now and just fine.
I know there are more, I'm tired and can't think straight now.
Lisa

 

[ruth]

Wow, good for you on repairing broken bones. Haven't had to do that yet, but there's always tomorrow.

 

[chickenzoo]

How bout massaging that gross white cottage cheese stuff out of a sick chickens eye!

Giving endless rounds of shots,(and i was afraid of needles) Staring at poo and trying to figure whats in it. LOL, mending straddle legs, deformed beaks, deformed legs, looking up umteen different dieases and studying them, giving advice of what you've learned the hard way to other chicken folk, and sometimes Vets.And having to end the suffering in others.

 

[ruth]

Quote:
That's the one that I'll do anything to avoid but know there will come a time when I will have to add that to my list.

 

[ruth]

O.K., lucky me, I just got to add something else to my Top Ten List.

Had a sick peachick that would not eat for past two days. I was at point of force feeding it a few drops of egg yolk yesterday to keep it alive. Went to feed it today and there was what looked like poop stuck in a few feathers on vent. Couldn't tell if it was coming out of vent, which was clean yesterday when I checked, so I gave it a little tug with my nails and it just kept coming out. It was six inches long with another long strand of hay coming out the end of that. It was about the width of a pencil and looked like a seven inch rope. Now I can add to my list that I basically tore it apart to see what the heck it was and best I can tell, it was a lot of twisted up hay, forming a rope that had been stopping her up. For added measure I gave her a couple of drops of olive oil and she is now eating like she's starving, which I guess she is.

Add to List:

Pull rope-like object out of peachick's vent and examine it.