That's so awesome that you got your Junebug back to good health!! Our Svart pullet is still shaking, but she has more strength and is more able to eat and drink on her own if we encourage her neck in the right direction. I think she is getting better! It will definitely still take some work though.
I'm sorry about your chick with the slipped tendon
We had exactly this same situation with a chick we got a
tractor supply back in August. She was laying down in the bin at
tractor supply looking at us, and we weren't even sure if we were going to get more chickens that day-- but we knew we would as soon as we saw her. And we could tell that something was wrong with her, which is actually the reason we got her ( so that she wouldn't get forgotten and would have a chance to be happy).
We didn't take her to the vet like you did with yours-- we figured, we could try to bandage it ourselves. The vet might have be able to do surgery, but we figured that might be kind of traumatic to put her through being so small, and that she might not make it from that anyway. We bandaged it every night for a few days, and it just did not want to go back in. So we left it.
Her name was Autumn. She was
the strongest little bird we had, because of her leg. We knew it might come to a point where her quality of life might not be good. We just wanted to give her as much of a happy chicken life as possible though. She was the absolute sweetest little bird ever.
And she was happy, for a while. When we'd let the chickens outside into the pen, we'd go out so that she didn't get trampled. Every time she would wander under our leg and just chill with us.
She was a rainbow, which is a really heavy hybrid breed. It got to a point where she was just so heavy, that her legs could no longer support her. Again, we knew this could be a possibility the whole time, and knew we may have to do something about it. The day it got really bad was on Christmas (go figure) when we couldn't even have taken her to the vet to have her peacefully euthanized. So we tried to help her, but she passed away two days later. It just got to be too much for her, I think.
It was the saddest thing, and I still feel bad for her thinking about it. But she isn't suffering anymore, and we did the best we could, so I just have to remind myself of that. I know she was happy for a long time, and that was worth it to us.
My point in telling you this isn't to give you no hope-- just know that you can only do what you can do, and try to help her have a happy life. And then, if the quality of life isn't any good, you have to be the one to judge it. I started a thread to see if anyone had any creative ideas to help her, you can read that
here.
At that point, Autumn was really too heavy for us to be able to do anything. However, you might be able to get some ideas from it!
Hopefully that will work with ours too! I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about with the violent head tucking and shaking,, sounds exactly like what ours is doing.
