Sick Hen Part 3. Goodbye

Difficult Decisions.

I was due to go away for a weekend of voluntary committee work and on the Friday morning Beatrice was looking very weak indeed. Her tail feathers were sodden with urates (the chalky and amoniac substances that were still passing through her digestive tract) and she was still vomiting. I really didn't want to go but it was a commitment I couldn't avoid. Before I went I sat her on my lap in the sunshine after I'd bathed her again and she rallied somewhat. She ate a little live yogurt, accepted her medicines stoically and settled in the crook of my arm making sad, weak little chicken noises.

I was very upset because, to be honest I didn't really think she'd still be alive when I returned. But Bob promised to come back from the allotment midday to check on her and make sure she was drinking and eating. I left her swaying slightly on one leg by the water dispenser in the coop.

When I returned she was looking wobbly so we brought her in again to sleep in he box in the sitting room. The night was cold and her poor bones were barely covered by feathers as she had lost so much weight. When I came home, earlier than usual, from work she was even weaker and as I picked her up she vomited again. It became apparent that she was ravenous but every time she ate solid food she was sick and she wasn't deriving any nutrition from the food she tried to eat.

I rang Mandy at All Creatures Vetinary Surgery and she got Erica the vet to call us back. We talked a little and I told her that, subject to Erica's examination, I felt our poor little hen was dying and it wasn't kind or fair to keep squeezing antibiotics into her and tempting her with food she couldn't digest. So I sat in the sun with her until Bob came back from the allotment and tried very hard not to cry. I failed and when Bob returned we put the poor soul into the cat basket and once more took the bus to Radcliffe.

There is something surreal about taking life and death decisions when the weather is warm and the sun is shining. It feels incongruous and as we walked up the road from the bus stop with our little bundle it had an air of unreality. I should mention here that there are women who can somehow manage to cry in a sweet delicate manner, crystal tears rolling fatly down their flushed cheeks displaying their grief without unduely disturbing their makeup. I am not one of those women.

By the time we got to the surgery I looked like I'd been punched several times and the bundle of kitchen roll in my handbag was sodden. Erica took one look at me and escorted us into the examination room. We opened the cat box and Beatrice was so weak she couldn't even spread her wings. Where before she'd happily have flown across the room we had to lift her out to be examined. She had lost another 150 grams in less than a week and she continued to dribble the clear brown watery liquid from her soft crop as I held her to be examined. 

To cut a sad story short we all agreed that it was kinder to put her to sleep than to allow her to slowly starve to death and so Erica injected her with a sedative and then adiministered the lethal dose. In the end her heart was fairly strong and it took a while for her to go. The vet suggested I put her down but somehow I couldn't let her go. We took her home in the cat basket which we placed in the outside refrigerator so we could finally lay her to rest the next day.

Rest In Peace Beatrice.

Sick Hen Part 2

Big City, Little Hen.

Arriving in the leafy village of Radcliffe on Trent Bob took our Beatie to the newly opened All Creatures Vetinary Practice. The observant among you will have noticed this is not the first time I have mentioned these lovely people. I am slightly biased because they were so helpful and so accomodating. You will see why.

The practice opened its doors for the first time on Monday off last week. Beatrice was one of their first patients and as it happened the new digital X-Ray machine needed christening. Beatrice Chicken to the rescue....sort of. Our lovely hen made her presence felt by vomiting mightily on their new fixtures and fittings. I suppose when a vet takes a hen's temperature a degree of surprise is to be expected-after all a hen cannot keep a syringe in her beak. I'll leave that one to your imagination.

Her temperature was normal but on palpation Erica was unable to tell whether she was feeling lymph nodes or something more sinister. So the X-Ray became necessary. These days it isn't necessary to wait hours for films to be developed. The digital image comes up on a computer screen and the vet can see immediately if there is a problem. Erica and Mandy have kindly allowed me to show you what this looks like.

My chicken anatomy is probably not a lot better than yours but the long white things on the right are leg bones and the shorter ones at the top are her wings. The large white speckledy mass near her leg bones is not, as I feared, an impacted egg but the pro-ventriculus. This is a part of the digestive system that contains grit to help the chicken break down it's food. I'm pleased to say this is normal. However the gassy area above it? Not so much.

Glad to know she wasn't egg bound Erica gave her two injections. An antibiotic and something to stop her being sick. Being an holistic practitioner she also gave us some Aloe Vera Gel to give her to help settle her stomach and restablish normal gut flora. With which Bob put her back in her basket and got back on the bus.

Over the next couple of days we kept her in and she started to look a great deal better. She was still sleeping inside so she didn't get chilled when out of sorts but able to scratch around in the garden a bit. 

We were starting to feel hopeful again.

Sleep well. Beatrice is.

Katherine

Sick Hen

When is a Hen Not a Hen?

Yesterday evening our lovely girl Beatrice was looking really sorry for herself. She was leaning against the coop next to the water feeder, her head hanging and her undercarriage sagging.

Frankly she looked really sick. I decided to bring her in

Now unless you know chickens you possibly don't realise that a chicken NOT eating a dish of catfood is a very sick chicken indeed. I grant you that as a diagnostic tool the Cat Food Test is possibly a bit of a blunt instrument but it certainly tells you if a chuck is off her food. It is also true that most packet cat food is rubbish and shouldn't really even be fed to cats HOWEVER.....I digress. We tried her on meal worms, another expensive delicacy and the same reaction. No interest whatsoever. So we set about picking her up to have a look at her.

Immediately a virtually inert chicken started dashing into corners we humans cannot reach. I crawled under the lower part of the run (knees in chicken poo, lovely) and eventually after Bob had unscrewed the top of the cage i managed to corner her and pass her out but it became evident she was vomiting. A lot. Once inside she calmed down enough for us to bath her and get another look at her vent. Vent is really a polite word for bottom. chickens don't have genitals as such. They have cloaca which is the exit for the entire gastrointestinal tract and the reproductive organs.

She still looked sore and red, she was still caked with poop and she was in a really sorry state. I put her in the sink and gave her a wash,

 the poor girl vomited through pretty much the whole procedure but then when I took her out, rough dried her and wrapped her in a dry towel she settled in my arms and nodded off dribbling yuk over my arm.

An experienced chicken person of our acquaintance sent us to the vet so we rang Erica at All Creatures Vetinary Center and having checked that she would probably survive the night made an appointment for the following morning. I sat with a shivering sleeping chicken on my lap while we finally got to watch some of the Indian Premier League cricket. At 1am we tucked her up in a nice large, clean cardboard box with straw and chipped card and a plenty of water and hoped for the best.

Bob put Beatrice who was, still looking pretty poorly, into the cat carrier and walked to the bus stop. You can imagine the kind of looks you get taking a hen on the bus in a largely middle class suburb. I guess we're already starting to sound a bit odd so we'll just have to get used to it. When my sister arrived later that night she was rather nonplussed by having a chicken in the sitting room warming up in her box. Possibly not as non plussed as she would have been had she seen me blow drying her earlier in the day.

More to follow

Katherine

Hen Washing-An Update

A little bit better.

Now we cannot claim she's exactly 100% but after her wash it took around an hour and a half for her fluffy little bottom to dry out. If I'm honest i'd say she needs another good wash in the near future but I might give her a day off for good behaviour. She was bustling about with the rest of them and there wasn't anything yucky hanging from the rear at the end of the day.

Tomorrow morning I'll check her out and let you know how it goes. There is another slight concern. She has a few feathers missing from the side of her neck. I noticed her pecking at them earlier so I don't know if she's been bullied or whether shes become irritable and done it herself but I'll keep an eye on it.

Meanwhile Henrietta's comb is looking very pale so i'll do a bit of research and get back to you on that one too. I don't like the girls to be out of sorts.

Please note No chickens were harmed during today's bathing protocols and gloves were worn at all times......

Enjoy your baths and showers in the knowlege that our little feathered girls are doing well.

Cleanly yours

Katherine

Washing Instructions: Handwash Only

When a chicken has a dirty bottom.

Our chickens were a sorry bunch when they first came to us but a diet of anything they can find in the garden, kitchen scraps, mealworms and organic layers pellets, plus sunshine, love and good old fashioned freedom they soon became bossy, healthy fully feathered girls. Ready to take on the world.

However Beatrice has always had a tendency to the runs. Her bottom feathers became more frequenly mucky, even when there was no mud in the garden and yesterday we plucked up the courage to have a good look at her rear end. Anyone who has animals knows this is not a thing to be done lightly. Aside from anything else there is no warning when the next load is about to be discharged. If you happen to have your face too close because, for instance, like me you really need a new pair of varifocals in order to see close up, the consequences are unpleasant to say the least. I can report that on this occasion I did not get chicken poop on my face!

Being sensible, scientific people we picked up the healthy looking chickens to have a look at first. It's always best to know what healthy looks like before you start jumping to conclusions. If healthy is bright green with purple spots then diagnosing martian flu is foolish. Our hens are not pure bred they are laying hybrids. We think, because of their lovely auburn colour and deep red combs that they probably have some rhode island red in them and Beatrice who is a little more blonde than the others may have some buff orpington in her heritage. The others, well it's mainly speculation so one can go too far. Possibly they have some royal blood or grandma had a run in with a turkey but hey? Who am I to judge? Anyway healthy for our hens turns out to be rather like my skin tone, beige-y pink and soft with no change of colour around the feather folicles. In Beatrices case she was red and sore around the vent-rather like a person might be after a nasty bout of food poisoning or a particularly hot curry. The skin around her feather follicles is also red and sore. To give you some idea her rear looked rather like a persons eye lid does when they have a sore eye.

At times like this the internet is a mine of information. Regrettably that information is almost certainly excessive. We've all checked our symptoms out on the internet and convinced ourselves that we have bubonic plague or yellow fever. I waded through terms like Egg Bind and Vent Gleet. Its possible the girls might have any one of dozens of parasites and other unpleasantness.  Mindful of my herbalist's training which makes the stern point (as does a doctor's training I am told) that when you hear hoof beats outside you window it is far more likely to be horses than zebras. In other words use Occam's Razor. The simplest answer is the most likely.

I'm going to digress a little here so if you're not interested in Occam's Razor skip this paragraph. A simple explanation is that when developing scientific theories one should always opt for the answer that makes the fewest assumptions. If you have to go piling on the "What ifs" then there is likely something wrong with your reasoning. The Latin phrase is Lex Parsimoniae. It is always possible that in the end a more complicated explanation may prove correct. However it makes sense to exclude the simple things first.  I cannot help but think that if this is the case perhaps quantum theorists might do well to go back and have a quick look at their assumptions. Just because you can make a theory work by adding in another assumption does not mean that your theory is correct.....

Back to Beatrice. Working on the theory that the simplest answer is the most likely I have decided to assume that walking round for weeks with a load of diarrhoea stuck to your skin and feathers is likely to result in a degree of soreness. To start with it's going to interfere with the ph balance of the skin and poor cleanliness never results in happy skin. So, sitting in bed last night thinking, as you do, about the problem of chickens bottoms, it became evident that Beatrice needed a bath.

Now when you read tales about travellers eating with primitive tribes they are always offered the "delicacy" this is usually something unconscionable such as testicles, eyes or the green wobbly bit that even your cat wouldn't eat. In a similar vein. It is said these things always taste far better than you expected (though I rather suspect it's the local's having a bet as to what they can make idiot tourists eat). I have read many books, blogs and articles which stated that CHICKENS LIKE WARM BATHS. And you know what? I didn't believe it. Not for a second. It's like all those people who tell you how their cat happily takes pills from their hand and doesn't maim the whole family while spitting it out of an upstairs window. Clearly tosh. So I took precautions. Shorts. Old clothes. Bare feet. Towels and a husband on standby to titter when I got most of the water and shampoo on myself.

I lifted poor Beatrice into a bowl of water about the same warmth you'd use for a baby. I'd put in some epsom salts and I used a herbal shampoo without paraben preservatives. Amazingly instead of flapping her wings clucking and covering me in a mixture of soapy water and chicken shit the little sweetheart stood with her sore little tail in the water while I gently rinsed her and soaked off the caked on muck. After 10 minutes or so Bob lifted her out of the water while I went for some clean warm water to rinse her off. She waited patiently and happily got back into the water. Even more amazingly she  allowed me to wrap her in towels to blot the worst of the water and sat on my lap while I did it.

Currenly she's a little damp but pottering happily about the garden with her damp tail feathers. I rather hope she doesn't pick up a load of dust from the mud flats but right now she's looking pretty happy and I'll let you know how she does when I've put a new plug on my hair dryer and given her a bit of a blow dry!

Yours cleanly
Katherine