I’ve not had a very good start with keeping backyard chickens. Two weeks after receiving the ex-battery hens, Dolores fell ill in a bad way. I noticed one Friday that she was separating herself from the other girls, which isn’t normal for her, as she was the Mother Hen of the flock. I quickly went down to the chicken run to examine the situation and discovered that she also had very bad diarrhea. My first thought was to text my husband, and the second was “what the hell do I do with a sick chicken?” Not knowing much about chickens, I just left her in the run with the others and hoped she was just having a bad day. By Saturday morning, I was all over the internet searching for remedies on how to cure chicken diarrhea!
I tried everything from olive oil to epsom salt and when that didn’t work, I tried apple cider vinegar. I even examined her to check if she was egg bound (when an egg is stuck in the oviduct). The list goes on and on. Since this was my favourite bird in the flock, I broke down and took her to an avian vet. Fortunately, she poo’d right on the examination table so he did a gram stain of her poo and said Dolores had traces of Clostridia O. I couldn't find any information on that on the web. He gave me a 5 day supply of Clavulox tabs (250mg) and told me to keep her fed and hydrated as I had been doing so far.
On returning home from the vet, we finally decided to isolate her from the others. In hindsight, that’s the first thing we should have done, as whatever bug one chook gets the others can get too. After finishing all her antibiotics and all the hand feeding and hydrating (and all the time I took off from work), she finally died. What a long and sad process.
I did so much research to help cure Dolores. I feel like a walking chicken encyclopedia (or Google link). Unfortunately all the remedies I read and tried just couldn’t cure my girl. We ended up burying her next to the chicken coop. Good bye Dolores.
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