Sunday evening I noticed that one of the ladies was sitting on the nest for far too long. She had her feathers all puffed up but wasn't producing an egg. In my grand year of owning chickens I have read a lot of information and backyardchickens.com is like a bible, but I am as far from an expert as you can get. The only thing it seemed to be to me is that she was egg-bound. This essentially means that the chicken has an egg stuck inside.
First course of action is to sit them in warm water thats at least a bit over their vent area. You have to keep them in at least 30 minutes to warm up their body and hope that it gets the egg moving along. You can also massage their abdomen to help. Well I couldn't feel the egg in their but wasn't sure what else I could do.
I set up Mabels dog cage with newspaper covering the bottom and covered it up. I have some of those bean things you put in the microwave to put on your shoulders, so I warmed them up and put them in plastic bags to warm her up a bit. She wasn't moving much at all and she would put her face towards the dark corner of the cage. She ate a bit and drank on monday, I ran to tsc to get some antibiotics that you put in water, in case the egg that was in her broke and was causing an infection. On Tuesday she seemed even more listless and I worried that because she wasn't drinking that the medicine wasn't going to help so we found we should try penicillin.
It was semi easy for husband to find out what kind of penicillin to get and what dose to give with some google searching. The problem is they really don't sell it for chickens but they do for horses etc, you can use this but in a much much smaller dose. They had it at our local PBS Animal Health. Its called Agricillin, and you keep it in the fridge. They give you the needles that you will need when you buy it.
So Tuesday afternoon we became home vets, I felt like we were taking care of things ourselves, saving money and doing it the way a farmer would instead of rushing to the vet. (Which I did call, and my vet does see any kind of animal, which is comforting). I was really nervous, i'm not a needles kind of gal so I was a bit queasy. Husband readied the needle and I held lady under my arm with her wings firmly in place so she couldn't squirm. You put the shot in the middle of their breast and from what we read they act like you are killing them on the spot. Well she didn't do this, their was some squeaking of sorts and a bit of movement but overall she didn't fight.
This didn't resonate well with me, it meant to me that if she was already too weak to put up a fight that our chances of making her better were probably pretty slim. I put her back in the cage and covered her up but moved her into the living room so she could be next to the wood burner nice and comfy. She hadn't ate or drank anymore since the morning i'm sure. I was pretty much expecting what happened when I looked in on Wednesday morning, she had died.
Husband preformed a necropsy which is the fancy name for animal autopsy. Just enough to see if it was an egg that was causing this problem. Well as soon as he opened her up he seen what looked like scrambled egg yolk. It appears that she laid an egg internally and either before that or during it something got ruptured and the egg crept out into her body.
All I can hope is that she wasn't in pain and suffering at all. Another day in a life with chickens. If you are thinking about getting chickens don't let things like this stop you. You can't know what will happen, chances are something will along the line somewhere, but it does help you feel like you will be better prepared for the next time. Now we have antibiotics and penicillin on hand, one step closer to being semi-homesteaders.
In other news we got another huge egg, hopefully our late lady wasn't the one who laid it or else that would be our answer. I'm sure it was our rhode island red.
And last I will leave you with a picture of Mable reflecting tonight on the days events, she was deeper in thought than me, I was dreaming of where to put the new hoop house...
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