Bitchin’ Chickens with Claire
Claire Dineen and her veterinarian friend do “tailgate necropsies” and share their findings on the Bitchin’ Chickens Blog. Fun conversation with some great info that is just the tip of the iceberg, check out her website for more information!
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Carey: 0:00
Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co host for the show, Jennifer Bryant, and we're here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible.
Jennifer: 0:24
Poultry Nerds, we are here with Claire, go ahead and introduce yourselves and tell people where they can find you.
Claire: 0:30
Sure. My name is Claire and I am the person behind the WordPress blog Bitchin Chickens. You can find me on WordPress, so it's It's Bitchin with a B I T C H I N, chickens, all one word, dot com. I'm on Facebook and Instagram as Bitchin Chickens Farm, and I'm also on YouTube as Bitchin Chickens.
Jennifer: 0:56
I didn't know you had a YouTube channel. Do you do all your necropsies on there?
Claire: 1:00
No, I haven't. I haven't. I was presenting this year at the the Backyard Chicken Summit. I don't know if you know it. It's an, it's American. I'm Canadian, but I was one of the two foreign presenters and you have to make a video. So it's when it's 25 to 30 minute video and then be available on the day of the summit. Your video goes live. There's 6, 000 people who can sign up for all the different events and then answer questions. So I thought I should set up a YouTube channel for my video and then I've started making smaller videos. And when I get it, this is a podcast, but I have been interviewed by Cable TV and so I've put up the little videos there. But I think the necropsy stuff on video would be great because the person who's doing the necropsies with me is somebody who is a veterinarian but also has a master's degree in avian pathology and has worked as an avian pathologist for more than 35 years and she's a fantastic teacher.
Jennifer: 2:13
Oh yeah, you should do that, like a whole channel of that stuff.
Carey: 2:17
Oh yeah, that would be cool.
Claire: 2:19
Yeah I'm, okay. So I'm in my early sixties. I'm not really technologically inclined. I've had to teach myself a lot of this stuff. I have younger coworkers that I say, what's this or how to do that? So I found a, I don't even have a cell phone. The cell phone I do have is a work one, but I found it, it has a fantastic camera, but also can make videos. So I think that is what I am going to start doing. This veterinarian doesn't live here full time. She's going to retire here and she has a home. And so she comes here every few weeks and we do what's called tailgate necropsy. She's got a big pickup truck and what we do is we spread out a big white, sheet. We do the necropsies outside and she wears her lab jacket and, explains everything. So I do, we do make those necropsies. into blog posts though. So there'll be like a case. And so we'll look at what the symptoms were. And then we cut open the bird and I take lots of pictures and then she explains what she sees and she's pretty accurate at getting a diagnosis.
Jennifer: 3:30
Wow. So I first found you an article came up on my feed, and I want to say a year or more ago, the one you did on lash eggs. And it was so fantastically written that still to this day when people comment about lash eggs, I still direct them to your website to read that blog article.
Claire: 3:49
Thank you.
Jennifer: 3:50
Very detailed, very good, written.
Claire: 3:52
Thank you.
Jennifer: 3:53
So today we're going to go through some common things that we see on social media that new people might think that they have, but don't necessarily have.
Carey: 4:04
So when I first heard the term bitching chickens, I was like, what is this? So obviously I had to hit Google and check everything out. And I started reading some of the articles and like she commented a while ago. Some of these are extremely detailed about their topic. And I like how you do include a lot of pictures. Here's one from October the 24th tailgate
Claire: 4:36
necroposy
Carey: 4:37
with her, and yeah, pop tailgate down, go through everything piece by piece. There's a lot of picture here, talks about what's going on, what you found, how it could be. what the options are. It's very detailed.
Claire: 4:55
I am an educator by trade in a different field. I work at a community health center for people. And my job actually is to go out in the community and I do workshops on a variety of issues. So I think I have a good sense about reading the room or, understanding who the audience is. And I just started working on the blog trying to refute a lot of the misinformation I see online. There's so many. Online groups and so many blogs and some of them are good and some of them are not and some of them have good information but also woven in that is Misinformation,
Carey: 5:36
right?
Claire: 5:37
You know my Blog has people who don't have chickens and may never have chickens, but have found chickens are interesting, or they might have had them and they miss having them. To people who are considering chickens, and want to do all the reading and preparation in advance, to people who've had chickens for a number of years, I also have a number of veterinarians, vet techs one of the people that I collaborate with works at a veterinary teaching hospital and she's a lab scientist. So all of those people I get information from, I bounce the articles off, but also we write articles together.
Carey: 6:20
Yeah, that's, and for me, that's one of the reasons why I started doing this podcast and several of the things that I'm involved in because you go through Facebook groups looking for stuff and people will tell you things that, they sound good. But once you start doing your homework and doing a little research, you find out that they are far from accurate. That's why Jennifer and I we decided, hey, look, when we do this, the topics that we discuss, we're going to talk about. Facts, things that we know to be true so that I really like that about your page. And I like another thing I liked about it that I noticed is when somebody goes to your page and they, just a home page. If they scroll all the way down past the first several, you've got categories. And I really like how you have a lot of this stuff broken down. Talk about some of those and how you go through categorizing everything and all that.
Claire: 7:31
Yeah. So I like my homepage. I chose that WordPress. Theme without even knowing anything about blogging and it turned out to be good because there's a lot of stuff right on my homepage so that people don't have to scroll through. There's all at the top are the latest articles followed by what I call a bit different things that are interesting that people might not be able to find elsewhere but would have a hard time maybe, searching for online and the whole bottom is around health issues. And when you get to all of those categories, if you want to find the old ones, there's an arrow that says older articles or archives, but there's also a search box. I now have 750 articles that I've done in the last six years. So I'm a pretty prolific writer. So if people want to find something from five years ago, they can just put in there. Something simple, not a long sentence, but egg binding, or lash egg, or something like that, and then everything that will come up that's related to that. I've tried to write articles from you're just thinking about chickens and know nothing, to you've had chickens for a long time, but maybe here's something you hadn't thought about. Also, after a while you write articles and you think what interests me? It's not just about thinking about an audience. You want to write something for yourself and keep yourself interested. So I've done a whole series called having chickens is a great way to meet your neighbors. I live on a small island. I've been here about 24 years and I'm known as the chicken lady, but there's a lot of conversations you have when you have chickens and sometimes it's people who don't even have chickens. I've got some wire, would you like it? Or, I have an egg customer who tells me an interesting story. So this is a series, I'm almost at number 50 and it's a combination of a profile about those people as well as their birds. So it's like, how did you get here? And what did you do beforehand? And all of those kinds of things, those kind of I've also got a series called, When Art Meets Chickens. So I profile artists, writers, and crafters who incorporate work that has chickens in it. So it could be sculpture, painting, jewelry, pottery, a book, poetry, all kinds of things. Whether they have chickens or not. And I've interviewed people from around the world for those, that series. That sounds
Jennifer: 10:09
super
Claire: 10:10
interesting and fun. It's totally fun. Like I, I interviewed. An Inuit woman in Greenland, whose English was her third language, about getting chickens in Greenland. And it's called Chickens at the Top of the World. And she was feeding them seal meat and having a heated coop over the winter because it gets so cold. And she had to import her chicks from Denmark. Because, there aren't chicken hatcheries in Greenland.
Jennifer: 10:45
I just have to know, how did that work out? Are they still there? Did they survive? Yeah, they are
Claire: 10:49
still there. And she sent me cool pictures like the Northern Lights over her chicken coop on the ocean at the top of the world. Yeah.
Jennifer: 11:02
Chickens are everywhere.
Claire: 11:03
Chickens are everywhere. They are the most populous bird species in the world. And everybody has stories. I'm just writing about a guy, an American who's married to a Cambodian woman and they live in Cambodia and he raises bantam chickens that are specific to that area.
Jennifer: 11:25
Wow. It's like the universal language of chillaxing.
Claire: 11:30
Yes,
Jennifer: 11:31
it
Claire: 11:32
is. When people are divided by politics and all kinds of things. But if you just talk about chickens, it does bring people together.
Jennifer: 11:41
It does. So let's talk about some common things that people might think that they have in their coop when they're just getting started. So what's the one thing that you see most often that You're Oh, that probably isn't what it is, but let's talk about it anyway.
Claire: 12:01
Oh yeah. There's, there seems to be a list of things that come up, and regardless of what the symptoms are, it's lash eggs, egg binding, coccidia And often it isn't. And I think let's even go back before that. Oftentimes, and I've written about this, people just write on Facebook groups, My chicken is sick. Help. Or, My chicken died. What do you think it is? And what I suggest is, You write down every symptom about what happened. Was your chicken limping three weeks ago? And two weeks ago, did it develop a cough? And a week ago, did it stop eating? Or, are any of your other birds sick? Has anybody died? What have you done to examine your bird. And people are like, oh, I'm afraid to pick it up. Sometimes you have to pick up your bird and feel, is its keel prominent? It's not eating. What color is its poop? I've done a whole article about poop and how to interpret the output. Is it green? Is it black? Is it red? Is it slimy? Those things. give you an idea about what's going on internally, right? Look at its feet, all of that kinds of things. Look, if it's drooling, look inside its mouth, take pictures, take a video, and then you post your question. Because I think a lot of people rush to try to help. Without getting the full information and I'll tell you a little story when I was a kid. My mother and I were in Mexico and we were a little lost. And so we went to a group of three men on a corner and said, do you know where whatever is. And all three of them said yes, and all three of them pointed in a different direction. All three of them wanted to be helpful, and they weren't doing anything to deceive us. I think that there's a need to want to help. And so people try to do something. When they don't have the skills, the ability, the knowledge to do that. And so it's really hard for a newbie or somebody who's not familiar with the condition to weed out what it is. Because you can scroll through the responses and you can get ten different diagnoses. Get antibiotics, don't use antibiotics, isolate your bird, kill your bird, all of these things. So I think that you have to find a really good source. That's based on science. And the reality is when you're on Facebook, Anybody can say anything and it doesn't get screened.
Jennifer: 14:49
That is a true statement. And I will have to tell you that I have been banned from most of the large chicken groups. Have
Claire: 14:58
you? Yes, I have. And sometimes they won't even tell me why it even places that I thought I had a good relationship. I'm suddenly blocked. There are groups that refused to talk about euthanasia. And I think that's a really big one that they will not allow any conversations. And so my mentor, Dr. Vicki Bose, who's a veterinarian and avian pathologist. is horrified by that. If you cannot take it to a vet, if your bird has a terminal condition, if your bird is in pain and suffering, and pain can be physical pain, but also fear, you need to do something about that. You can't just put your bird in the coop and hope it dies in the morning. You wake up the next day and it's not dead and you just keep letting it go. Because people often say, my bird has been ill for weeks. And those groups say, try antibiotics, try this home remedy, try, Epsom salt
Jennifer: 16:06
baths. Oh my God.
Claire: 16:07
So let's put it this way. If you were sick and on death's door, would you want to be stripped naked and put into a bathtub? I've been giving my chicken a bath every day for a week and it's not getting better. It's probably, in shock. Yeah.
Jennifer: 16:23
Just out of curiosity, how many Epsom salt baths have you given chickens?
Claire: 16:28
I give them for. bubble foot. And I've given it for vent cleat when I'm trying to clear off. I've only ever had one case of vent cleat, trying to clear off all of that stuff to find out what was underneath. But it's not, my chickens do not get bathed on a regular basis.
Jennifer: 16:50
No, I've never done an Epsom salt bath, ever.
Claire: 16:54
Epsom salt, it has the word salt in there, it is not a sodium, it is a magnesium. You can't substitute table salt, because Epsom salts come from Epsom, England, and it is a magnesium, that's a drawing thing. If you had an infection, You might use Epsom salt.
Jennifer: 17:17
Makes sense. But a bath is going to stress a bird. Because it's not normal. And so if it's already stressed because it's sick. You're just stressing it more. Yes,
Carey: 17:30
and a lot of people don't realize that and like for like in people When you're more stressed your immune system is not good It makes it worse. So your conditions worse. Don't go dunking it in a bucket of water
Claire: 17:46
Nope, and I think about okay if you were sick, what would you want? You'd want a nice cozy bed, be warm, and have somebody bring you something nice to eat or drink. Your chicken probably needs to be isolated in a quiet, darkened place where it's warm, and allow it to, allow it, to see Is it eating or drinking? Is it pooping? And try to monitor from there.
Jennifer: 18:15
Yes I 100 percent agree. So let's just go through a couple of these. Let's start with lash egg because that was how I was introduced to you. So I have never had a case of lash egg here. So tell me how you would. First, make your list of symptoms and then come to that conclusion.
Claire: 18:34
Okay, so LASHAG is a common term for salpingitis, and that is a bacterial infection in the oviduct. So it's, tends to be an accumulation of different bits of an egg and bacteria. And over time, so at first they look like little rubbery things, but over time they take the form of an egg because they're in the oviduct. It's not an egg. It's formed by the oviduct and then it has lamination. So if you cut it in half, it looks fantastic. It's all these little layers. of pus and yolk and other things. I've never had a bird pass a lash egg. So sometimes people say, I found this weird rubbery thing. in the nest box and I don't know who it came from. So I asked my mentor, Dr. Bose, what would you do? She said sometimes when they are small like that, the infection is encapsulated in the lash egg and it gets passed. You don't have to do anything. You also need to determine who it's from. And often online advice says it's a bacterial infection, therefore Give everybody antibiotics. If you have a flock of 30 and only one has a bacterial infection, you do not give antibiotics to 29 other hens. I have found lash egg or self meningitis upon necropsy. And so you cut the bird open and it's wow, this thing was inside. And at that point, it was too big to pass. And at that point, it's too big to save, because you can give that bird antibiotics, but where does that mask go? It's not going to pass. I do know people who've spend money on a bird to remove like a mouse from egg yolk peritonitis. Because it's the size of a baseball, it's not going to come out, but there's no guarantee that's not going to get repeated. So I think when you find something rubbery, weird, cut it open, it's clearly not an egg in the nest box, it's a wait and see. If you've got a coop cam, great. If you, and you know what, you asked what the symptoms are. Sometimes the symptoms are nothing until death. I've been totally surprised when I found my first salpingitis, or I've had birds that look pretty good. And then I looked at them and I thought, Oh no, here's somebody that's sick. And they hide those symptoms so well. And if you're at this time of year, I leave. early in the morning. So my birds aren't up. The automatic door opens when I come home. They're already in or on their way to bed. I don't see them until the weekend. So it's really possible that a hand on Sunday could go downhill by the end of the week. And then it's already too late. That would be, what do you do so you can send your bird for a necropsy where I am in British Columbia. We have the ministry of agriculture that subsidizes necropsies. So your first submission of a calendar year, which includes up to six birds, if they died around the same time of the same cause for 25. Dollars. I've heard of other states where they charge 300 or some places like teaching veterinary hospitals where they're free. So you can send that bird in and you can ask for a number of things make sure that you know what you're getting and what you're paying for because some people real didn't realize they paid for the gross necropsy, but no microscopic work, no lab work. Or you can do what I call a DIY necropsy. I've written an article about it. Make a list of all the symptoms and then you take your bird and you cut it open and Trying very carefully take pictures of everything as it looked when you opened it up and then very carefully Remove every organ take a picture front and back and make a note did something smell was something Too big or too small hard soft, was there bile did Yep Yellow liquid goes spurting out any of those things and then you can post it online and that can you can often see Tumors on a liver or salpingitis or something? You don't need to spend three hundred dollars on that and so the series that I have with my mentor is That people send me those pictures or I collect them. We look at them and then We call it best guess or, show and tell. Sometimes we call it gore fest, depending on what it is. And some things she can look at and like she can say, I know exactly what that is. And then other things she'll say, I don't know, but it could be this or that. And if it was this is what I would do. And if it was that, sometimes it's about monitoring. Sometimes it's about how did a bird to this state. when it probably should have been euthanized long ago. Really allow birds to suffer. And I know they're resilient and I know sometimes they will survive. But if you're going to have catastrophic injuries, you need to look at pain management as well. This idea that people say birds are stoic, therefore they don't experience pain. Of course they do. If you just had your wing ripped off, or your leg ripped off, or you got attacked by a predator, you're in pain. If you've got a mass inside you. So one of the things I'll talk about is that penguin stance. So when you see a bird walking totally upright, like a penguin it's usually a couple of things. Ascites, which is water belly. It's an accumulation of fluid in the abdominal cavity. And at first, it's probably totally pain free and the bird can survive just fine. But as that fluid accumulates, it starts to pressure, press on the internal organs. And so that bird is walking upright, trying to take that pressure off. That bird's in pain. The other thing it might be is a mass. And a mass could be salpingitis, sometimes it's cancer or something. You'd be amazed at what you find on a necropsy and you think that bird looked relatively normal on the outside and what was going on in the inside.
Jennifer: 25:32
First I'd like to also say that it's important to know what you're looking at. First, we also need to define necropsy for people who don't know what they are. That's when you dissect a deceased animal look at what's going on the inside in order to see what may have happened and you can do it yourself or you can pay your Department of Ag in your state to do it. If you also butcher your own chickens for your meat supply, you will learn as you go what it should look like. Harvesting Cornish that will enlighten you pretty good at what you shouldn't be seeing in there. I saw my first we're getting off topic here, but I saw my first I think they call it spaghetti breast.
Claire: 26:22
Have
Jennifer: 26:24
you heard of that?
Claire: 26:26
I have,
Jennifer: 26:27
I saw my first one this year and the breast meat, it literally looked like spaghetti noodles. But it also had grass in it. Somehow the grass had made it all the way into the breast meat. It was not good looking.
Claire: 26:43
No, you don't want to eat it.
Jennifer: 26:46
No, you didn't want to eat this.
Claire: 26:48
No, and people post Cornish necropsies, like they butchered them, and then they show a liver and say, Oh, what is this? You don't want to eat any bird that's had filter organ issues. So the kidneys and the liver. So it's like you're going to toss those ones. And so it can be tumors. It can be cancer, can be Marek's disease. So Marek's is one we can talk about. Marek's and Leukosis both cause tumors and they are often very similar in their symptoms. Marek's tends to affect birds around. 7 to 10 weeks or around sexual maturity doesn't usually affect older birds. I've had Marix in my flock and Dr. Gose did the first necropsy that diagnosed Marix in my flock and that bird was 21 months old. She said in three decades, that's the oldest bird she had seen with Marix. If it's leucosis, it takes far, it's a very slow developing the tumors. So it takes much longer. So if you've got a two year old bird, it's probably leucosis, but you really do need a professional necropsy to determine those because leucosis can spread from hand to chick through the egg. Whereas Merrick's doesn't.
Jennifer: 28:14
So what would be the symptoms of the two?
Claire: 28:17
Okay. So Merrick's. They form tumors in different places. So Merrick's can form in the eye. It's called ocular form of Merrick's and often it's a gray eye. And on Facebook, any weird looking eye, everybody screams Merrick's. It could be cataracts. It could be glaucoma. It could be a penetrating injury. It doesn't have to be Merrick's. Merrick's eye is quite, it's often gray. And then it can form tumors on the sciatic nerve. So limping is a big one. People often talk about my birds limping and they look at the foot. But the limp might actually originate internally. So if there's tumors on the sciatic nerve, you're gonna get limping. And when they curl their toes, so it looks like they're forming a fist, and they walk on, it's called knuckling, so they're actually walking on their knuckles. That's typical of Marix. There can be a visceral form of Marix. So the internal organs have tumors. It can also be, there's neurological. So you get tumors on the brain and I've had a number of birds with Merrick. So I've seen what it looks like. I haven't had leucosis, but they share some of those same things. They both form tumors.
Carey: 29:38
So tell me this, if you have a bird that has marriage, what do you do?
Claire: 29:41
Okay. So I panicked when I read that first necropsy. So I sent birds and they came back positive and I thought this is the end of my flock. I have to kill everybody and I will never get birds again because Marix can live in the soil in the environment for five years. So I called Dr. Bose and I was like, Oh my God, what am I going to do? And she talked me off the ledge. She said, Marix is not the worst thing you can have. And in fact, probably. Every small flock has Marix. There is more than one strain, and not every flock will become symptomatic. Why my flock did after having 10 years of birds, I don't know. And not every bird will be positive in a flock, and not every bird who has Marix will die. And that has been borne out with me. So the first year, I had a mother and three of her chicks, and I'll die of Marix at different times, and then the next year I had nothing. And then for the next three years, I've had two young birds die, and they've always died around 10 weeks or around sexual maturity. And that's it for my whole flock. What she said is keep your birds healthy because Marix is triggered by stress. So all your birds carry something, it's if I walk into a room and I have a cold and I'm coughing and sneezing, not everybody's going to get it and not everybody who breathes in my germs is even going to get it. So what you're trying to do is build up healthy immune system and reduce stress. Stress is often caused by lots of fluctuation of birds in and out of a flock, people start off with a few and we call it chicken math, right? So they got you, but now they want. They want a brown bird, then they want a black bird, then they want a green egg layer. And I liken it to what happens if you lived in a house with four roommates and you liked them and everything was going and then your landlord decided they wanted to move in a few more. Oh, and then they moved in a few more without asking you, right? And that's how chickens feel. They are flock animals. They have a hierarchy and a pecking order, and you keep disrupting that. And that's a really stressful things and birds will kill other birds out of that stress. So think about. If you're a newbie, what's your maximum? And I would suggest you get your maximum at the very beginning and not do this in and out thing. And in and out also is more likely to bring pathogens into your flock. Something that even a healthy looking bird might carry.
Jennifer: 32:34
Yeah, we did a podcast a few weeks ago on quarantine. And that should limit that, but the stress that you're talking about, like if you're at work and you get stressed and your neck and your shoulders start hurting, that's a physical response to your stress.
Claire: 32:51
And
Jennifer: 32:51
so the birds, when they get stressed, they're going to have that same kind of physical reaction. And their immune system is more delicate than ours and it's going to impact it.
Claire: 33:02
Sure. You have a, what's called a flight or fight response, and that's about cortisol. It's meant as a surge to get you out of a, an emergency situation, but when you're under stress, you are releasing that cortisol into your system all the time. And in people, it makes you sick, but it does in animals too, so I would, it was, it's about understanding your flock dynamics. It's about, have there been any predators around are they competing for water, for food, for roosters, for nest boxes, make sure you have multiples of all those things. Sometimes. Pecking occurs at night when people are fighting, or chickens, are fighting over the roost bars, all of those kinds of things. And a lot of
Jennifer: 33:53
this stuff can be handled through just simple observation, 10, 15, 20 minutes.
Claire: 33:59
You learn a ton of things. From your birds. And people say things like, Oh my roosters are fighting and nobody's dead yet. They'll work it out. That's stressful for both the winner and the loser, right? It doesn't matter that they're not necessarily drawing blood. It's stressful.
Jennifer: 34:18
So I have to tell you a little story, and you'll appreciate my little story. So I had a turkey hen, and her name was Fannie Mae, and she was really, she was a witch. And every night, she would be the first on her roost. And then the chickens and the other couple, I had a, it was a mixed flock at the time. And the chickens would get up, and they'd be the last ones up there, and she'd wait just before dark. Just right when they can't hardly see again. And she'd put her head down, she'd turn sideways, and she'd bulldoze every one of them off that roost. And then they would end up sleeping on the floor underneath of her, and be covered in poop and everything else in the morning. So it took us a while, some observation every night to see what in the world is going on in this coop. And that darn turkey, I'm going to tell you, she lived to be like six years old. The simple fix was, because for the turkeys I used two by eight, We just took some like six inch pieces of board and screwed them straight standing straight up and we made bedrooms on the roost. Oh, she was so mad. She would get up there and she'd be so mad, but the tickets could then stand, on the roost. And she couldn't bulldoze them off anymore. But just that simple observation fixed the entire problem.
Claire: 35:44
I think just sitting, take a coffee out there and watch them and you'll learn, who's the dominant and who's not. I've heard of stories where if you have an automatic door or a door, the dominant one will stand just inside the coop and stop them from coming in at night. And the door goes down, but just watch all of those, but you'll also see who is standing off on their own and who's fluffed up a bit, who see, sometimes when chickens are sick, they seem to be eating, but when you watch them really closely, it's just pecking mindlessly. I think it's like a instinctual behavior, but you realize, yeah, they're pecking at food, but they're not really eating. And then you realize, oh, this is a sick bird.
Jennifer: 36:32
Yeah. So do you medicate your birds very much? Do you have a medicine cabinet?
Claire: 36:38
I did my whole presentation at the Backyard Chicken Summit on first aid kits and health checks. And in my first aid kit, I've got, tons of stuff. Medication, no. What I've never used antibiotics. I haven't had a lot of bacterial infections. In Canada, we have to go through a veterinarian to get drugs. You can't just buy them at Tractor Supply. I have a really good first aid kit. It's like two taco boxes. And I've got all kinds of stuff. But
Jennifer: 37:13
like what kind of stuff?
Claire: 37:15
Wound care, I've got dressings and vet wrap and calcium and different vitamins vetericin, antibacterial spray, polysporins with, okay, here's something people say you can't use polysporin with cane in it, like the suffix cane, they say, Oh, it's toxic on chickens. I asked Dr. Bose and she said, those studies have been done in canaries and small birds, not in chickens. And actually it's better to use like a polysporin with pain relief because that's probably the only pain relief they're going to get. So that's something that's said on Facebook all the time. Do not use pain relief. That's not. So I have a lot of Oh I, so when my hen had vent glee, it's a yeast infection, right? So it's similar vaginal yeast infections in women. And so I went to the pharmacist and I looked and the The name brand stuff was so much more expensive, Monistat or Conestin or something. So I went to the pharmacist and I asked him if this no name brand was equivalent. And I said, it's for my hen and I think he thought I was using a euphemism because he went through his speech and he said, Oh, is there any chance she's pregnant? And I said, hens don't get pregnant. And he was so embarrassed, so I have things like that. Monostat, kinestin. So with a vent glee, you not only have to put it externally, you have to insert it with the plastic applicator inside the vent and also give them a pea size amount of the cream or a cut up tablet orally. I just gave it to my, I had the cream on my finger and the hen ate it every day. I didn't have to worry about trying to jam it into her.
Jennifer: 39:17
So I've never had vent glee. So how common do you think that really is?
Claire: 39:22
Okay. I've had chickens for 15 years and that's the only case I've ever had. And it was the quintessential case of stinky vent. What was coming out of her and it took 11 days to totally get better. People think it's pasty butt. Pasty butt is something that chicks get. Vently, there's a totally different thing that hens get.
Jennifer: 39:45
Correct. Yeah.
Claire: 39:47
But, I don't think it's that common. I think a lot of things that people say are not that common. And another thing is, Should you deworm or not? So people say I found this worm and it's typically a round worm in a poop. And I asked Dr. Bose about that. And she said, all chickens carry parasites. The reality is it's not unhealthy unless your bird already is compromised or there's a large load of worms, but they can coexist with those. So you don't want to just keep. giving them medications on a regular basis to try to get rid of worms all the time.
Jennifer: 40:30
So deworming, which I've never done either it causes its own imbalance, which is just swinging you the other way. And I just want to throw this out there because it's a pet peeve of mine on Facebook. It's not a preventative. You can't prevent a worm from crawling around something. Yes. You either get rid of it or you don't have, you can't. I know.
Claire: 40:50
Yeah. Yeah. It's not like a flu shot prevents you from getting the flu. If they don't have worms, worming them is not going to treat anything, right? And so you're giving birds drugs on a regular basis. And people often say, Facebook folks, prescribe antibiotics. Nobody except a vet can prescribe, but they're prescribing antibiotics for things like viruses. Viruses are not, don't respond to antibiotics. They're antibacterial. And also, when I talked to Dr. Bose, she's really good because she'll say, Oh, I see that they used a certain kind of antibiotic and it's the wrong antibiotic. And I said what do you mean by that? She said they're targeted. There's a whole class of drugs and antibiotics are not interchangeable. Some of them are used for different things like your infections or broad spectrum or, various things. So you need to have the right antibiotic. the right dosage and the right way it gets into them.
Jennifer: 42:01
Let's talk about one more thing. Sour crop. Again, something else I've never seen in my flock. So have you?
Claire: 42:09
I had a crop issue once, and I think by the time I saw it and I felt it, it was an impacted crop and I was doing the whole thing about trying to massage it, trying to break it up, withholding food. And at about day 10 I was thinking, oh, I am not gonna be doing at-home surgery. And suddenly I pushed this. And I felt a pop under my finger, and it must have been encapsulated, whatever it was, and she was just fine after that. But sauerkraut is about stuff that gets held there food or other things in the crop, and then they start to ferment.
Jennifer: 42:54
People who don't know, I like to call this, the crop is more like a grocery bag that you're just holding food in before it gets to the digestion part of it. There's not actually anything other than that going on in the crop because the chicken will eat and then when it gets to a safe place that it's comfortable. Then it will start processing the food, so
Claire: 43:22
and I often get it like eating hay, something long, but something that can already have molds and things on it as well. You never want to feed your like people say, I've got moldy bread. Can I give it to my birds? You never want to give mold. You could cut mold off, but you're not giving moldy food to your chickens because that mold Goes and sits in their crop. Hey, that's why
Carey: 43:47
everybody needs pigs.
Claire: 43:49
Yes Sometimes you just have to think would I eat that right? Yes I know chickens eat everything but not everything is good for chickens or this idea that Oh chickens won't eat anything that's bad for them. They eat screws. They eat nails. There's all kinds of things chickens will eat. They peck at things before they even know what it is.
Jennifer: 44:10
Yeah. Yep. We're going, we're getting on to our time here. But we want to make sure that people understand that it may be new to chickens or thinking about chickens. It's, these things are the exceptions to the rules. It's very possible. You'll go 15 years without having a sick bird. It's not This is not something you're gonna wake up every day with and have to see and have to have a hospital ready for your chicken
Claire: 44:37
No, it's I okay. You'd be really lucky if you went 15 years I've had vent prolapses three times. I've had Merrick's I've had You know some predator injuries, various things through necropsies You But you do need to have a good first aid kit, and be prepared for that because, I had a dog that would eat things and it always happened at night or a long weekend and then it's an emergency and often people are posting on Facebook. The vets closed till, Monday and now it's Friday night. What do I do? And they have nothing in their first aid kit and they're scrounging around. So what I suggest is go through your house and look for things that you can already use, start assembling those things in one place. And sometimes if you have to buy something in quantity, I split it and I split the cost with my friends. So if you don't need a big thing of whatever but it's good to have an assortment of things on hand.
Jennifer: 45:44
Yeah. I can see that. I don't have a first aid kit myself, but I, me and Carrie are a little bit on the different side for that, but for the backyard keeper, I can, you have to have some things. I have things for the dogs and cats and stuff. I'm a little bit more ruthless with the birds. But I breed for resistance and that's a thing too, so you just have to sit down and decide what kind of bird keeper you want to be. Do you want to be somebody who's constantly hospitalizing birds or do you want to be somebody who enjoys their birds and they have a purpose on your property and or in somewhere in between? You just have to decide for yourself.
Claire: 46:28
So The person who works at the veterinary teaching hospital that I talked about, that's one of my collaborators. She spent 10, 000 on open heart surgery for her bird. And I've written a blog and I have some of the operating room video. This bird's case went to conferences around the world. She made People Magazine, right? Not everybody is that person. Wow. Yeah, wow. It made for a very, it made for a very interesting case study. But, it's stressful for you. It's stressful for the bird. So you need to be prepared for what those things are. You need to have some, another thing people don't have is, Where to put a sick bird. I don't have room in my coop, they say. And, so you have to have a dog crate, be prepared to put it in your garage or your basement or in your house. You can't leave a sick bird with the flock. And if you can keep it separate, then you can really monitor what it's eating, what it's drinking, what it's pooping.
Jennifer: 47:35
Yep. Yep. But you don't have to, you just have to be aware and make decisions. and be prepared to follow through on those decisions, whichever kind of birdkeeper you want to be.
Claire: 47:48
If you're not the kind of person who euthanize, who physically can't euthanize your own birds like me, I'm worried about screwing up, but I have a number of friends that I could call and they would euthanize my bird with using cervical dislocation. It's the fastest, most humane way. And I wouldn't let that bird suffer. But I definitely have euthanized younger birds, and even though I know it's the right thing to do, it's still difficult.
Jennifer: 48:24
Yep, it is, and it shouldn't be easy. You should, you're taking a life, and you should be aware of that.
Claire: 48:30
For sure.
Jennifer: 48:32
Alright, Claire, it's been a pleasure having you today.
Claire: 48:35
It's nice to meet you too.
Jennifer: 48:37
And we'll be back next week.
