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