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Chicken Health For Dummies
Author:
Published:
January 29, 2013
Overview
Everything you need to care for and keep happy, healthy chickens
With directives on diagnosing and treating sick or ailing chickens, as well as general information on how to keep chickens in peak condition, Chicken Health For Dummies is your go-to guide on how to best care for and keep chickens.
Inside, you'll get everything you need to know about chicken health and wellness: an encyclopedia full of common and not-so-common diseases, injuries, symptoms, and cures that chicken owners may encounter. Chicken Health For Dummies provides chicken owners with one handy, all-encompassing
resource.
- Helps you identify potential hazards and signs of ill health in your chicken
- Shows you how to properly examine chickens to identify and isolate potential health issues before they spread to the rest of the flock
- An encyclopedia full of common and uncommon diseases, injuries, symptoms, and cures for chickens
Chicken Health For Dummies joins Raising Chickens For Dummies and Building Chickens Coops For Dummies to round out the For Dummies reference library as a must-have resource for both rural and urban chicken owners.
As a chicken flock keeper, you’re concerned about the well-being, safety, and health of your flock. Although you can’t control everything, such as predators, pests, diseases, and injuries, you can take a proactive role to ensure your chickens thrive in your backyard.The following can help you raise healthy chickens so they can provide you with eggs and happiness for years to come.
About The Author
Julie Gauthier is board certified in veterinary preventive medicine. Rob Ludlow is the coauthor of Raising Chickens For Dummies and Building Chicken Coops For Dummies. He runs the leading chicken information resource on the web, www.BackYardChickens.com.
Articles From The Book
3 results
Chickens
Articles
Following are the most common questions that flock keepers ask about the health of their chickens. We provide quick, concise answers that you can take to heart or share with a fellow flock keeper in the time it takes you to check out at the feed store.What is that lump on the side of a chicken’s neck?Most likely, the lump on the side of your chicken’s neck is normal.
Chickens
Articles
Biosecurity is a set of practices — things you do every day— that helps keep infectious organisms, such as viruses and bacteria, out of your chicken flock. If a disease-causing organism manages to find its way into your backyard chicken flock, the same biosecurity practices can help prevent the spread of the disease between your chickens, or the spread outside your flock to someone else’s chickens.
Chickens
Articles
Bumblefoot is the term used for any swelling of a chicken's toe or foot pad (the spongy bottom of the foot). The condition is an extremely common problem for older backyard hens. Chickens with bumblefoot usually limp, or in severe cases, don’t use the leg at all due to pain.
Bumblefoot starts as a minor injury, such as a bruise, puncture wound, scrape, or puncture wound, that you may not have noticed at first.
Chickens
Articles
Some of the problems that backyard chicken flock keepers most frequently see in their hens are respiratory illness, feather loss, and strange eggs. The following contains some common causes for some chicken ailments. Other things could be responsible for the signs you’re seeing, but they’re less likely to be the culprits than the causes listed in the table.
Chickens
Articles
Sometimes, your chicken can develop problems where the crop won’t empty properly, leading either to sour crop or crop impaction. Most times, the bulge on the front of your chicken’s neck is most likely normal. Chickens have a built-in doggie bag — the crop, which is a bulge in the esophagus where food treasures from foraging are saved for leisurely digestion another time.
Chickens
Articles
A star-performer backyard hen can lay more than 250 eggs a year, but even superstars have occasional bad days, and not all of her eggs will be perfect. Some of the eggs from healthy hens are really weird: soft, rubbery, sandpapery, or lumpy, for example. Hens that consistently lay abnormal eggs, however, are likely to have a problem somewhere in the plumbing of the reproductive tract.
Chickens
Articles
As a chicken flock keeper, you’re concerned about the well-being, safety, and health of your flock. Although you can’t control everything, such as predators, pests, diseases, and injuries, you can take a proactive role to ensure your chickens thrive in your backyard.The following can help you raise healthy chickens so they can provide you with eggs and happiness for years to come.
Chickens
Articles
Coccidiosis is such a common and serious problem for flock keepers everywhere. Microscopic coccidia parasites are the archenemies of poultry farmers, who must spend tremendous amounts of effort and money to keep coccidiosis at bay. The parasites can multiply to overwhelming numbers in the digestive tracts of chickens, usually young ones, causing bloody or watery diarrhea, poor growth, and death.
Chickens
Articles
Some loose droppings are normal for chickens. Several times a day, a chicken passes sticky, smelly brown cecal poops that you may mistake for diarrhea. Droppings that look like cecal poops should make up no more than one-third of the droppings you see in the coop under the perches in the morning.
Flock keepers usually recognize diarrhea in a flock of chickens when they see hens with dirty vents or stained eggs.
Chickens
Articles
A hen having trouble laying eggs is egg-bound. When part of a hen’s oviduct (which should stay inside the abdomen) sticks out through the vent to the outside, the hen is suffering from a vent prolapse, oviduct prolapse, or more graphically, a blowout.
Identify vent prolapse and egg-binding
A hen who spends a lot of time in the nest box is broody, not egg-bound.
Chickens
Articles
Your chicken-keeping philosophy will determine how well stocked your backyard flock first aid kit should be. At a minimum, every flock keeper should have a hospital cage in which to assess and isolate a sick or injured chicken, and have the ability to humanely euthanize a hopelessly ill bird. Other items you may find useful in your first aid kit are
A spare heat lamp and bulb (non-shatterproof) or other heat source to warm a chilled bird (especially chicks).
Chickens
Articles
Gout in chickens isn’t a single disease but a sign of dysfunctional kidneys. A long list of causes can lead to kidney disease, and high on the list are infections, nutritional imbalances, toxins, or water deprivation. If many birds in a flock are exposed to the same kidney-trashing circumstances, gout can kill a large proportion of a flock, maybe half of the birds.
Chickens
Articles
Some health problems are unique to broilers, the strains of chickens that have been specifically designed by people for meat production. Backyard flock keepers can purchase day-old broiler chicks and raise them, usually up to 6 to 12 weeks of age, to supply home-grown meat for a family or small farm business.
Using intense selective breeding, poultry companies have created modern meat-type chicken strains that are vastly different from heritage breeds of poultry, such as their Plymouth Rock and Cornish breed ancestors.
Chickens
Articles
After you recognize that you have a sick chicken, you need to do a physical examination to collect more clues about the problem. A chicken physical exam rarely includes taking the temperature or pulse. You just need to look closely at all areas of your chicken's body and behavior.
Catch and hold the sick chicken
The first step in examining your sick chicken is catching it and then holding it so you can start the examination.
Chickens
Articles
Sometimes your flock may come down with ailments caused by fungal infections. Fungi aren’t plants or animals; they’re a unique, primitive category of life all their own. Mushrooms, molds, and yeast are fungi. Molds and yeasts can infect and sicken backyard chickens under the right circumstances.
Brooder pneumonia (aspergillosis)
Aspergillus mold organisms grow in every chicken’s environment, flourishing in damp bedding and rotten coop wood.
Chickens
Articles
The most common problems of the growing period of backyard chickens’ lives are respiratory illness, diarrhea, and nervous system problems. Young chickens can suffer from all the causes of respiratory illness in adult birds and diagnosis and treatment are the same.
Respiratory problems in young chickens
Brooder pneumonia and gapeworms are two special respiratory problems of chicks that aren’t usually seen in grown-up chickens in backyard flocks.
Chickens
Articles
Before you can help a sick chicken, you need to know how to identify a sick chicken. The figure shows a droopy chicken, exhibiting several signs of illness. Here’s how a droopy chicken looks and acts:
The head is hanging down and the eyes are slightly or completely closed. (Perhaps a headache?)
The bird is huddled or crouching.
Chickens
Articles
The starting point in a chick’s life is pipping, the moment that a chick breaks through the shell and begins its entrance into the world. A healthy hatchling innately knows exactly what to do, and you shouldn’t interfere with the program.The moment for you to step in is immediately after hatching, when you have a role in preventing four common problems of the newly hatched, which are chick malformations, spraddle legs, belly button infections, and pasty vents.
Chickens
Articles
For the first few days after hatching, a chick can’t maintain her own body temperature and needs to be kept warm, either by mother hen’s body heat or by a supplemental heat source that you can provide.
The egg yolk, which the chick absorbed into her abdomen during the last few days before hatching, provides an energy source to keep the chick going for a couple of days, while she’s figuring out how to eat and drink.
Chickens
Articles
During the postmortem exam of a chicken, you should evaluate the internal organs first. Then, move on to the head and neck, following by the joints and nerves. To inspect these items and finish up your chicken necropsy, follow these steps:Turn the bird around to face you.Use your scissors and cut through the corner of the mouth.
Chickens
Articles
You may want to review chicken anatomy before you make your first cut. As you perform the steps, jot down notes about anything that puzzles you during the necropsy. Describe the color, size, texture, and location of the things you saw in simple terms so that you can look up your findings later or describe them to your chicken health advisor.
Chickens
Articles
A zoo of parasitic worms can be found in chicken flocks. Worms find cozy places to stay in the crop, gizzard, intestine, cecum, windpipe, and even the eyelids.
Credit: Illustration by Barbara Frake
The eggs and immature stages of many parasitic worms can live outside of the chicken host for a long time, possibly several years.
Chickens
Articles
Chickens have extremely good daytime vision. In fact, chickens rely on their sense of sight more than other senses to conduct their daily business. Flock keepers notice quickly when chickens have impaired vision and aren’t able to find food, navigate the coop, or avoid bullies.That’s when they take a closer look at the chicken’s eyes, and find .
Chickens
Articles
Chicken parasites are a given in most backyard coops. External parasites — lice, mites, fowl ticks, and chiggers — are the creepy-crawlies found on the outside of the chicken, so common that earlier poultry tenders didn’t even bother treating chickens for them. That said, these pests can cause anemia, damaged feathers, weight problems, poor laying, or — in young birds — death.
Chickens
Articles
Typical signs of respiratory illness in chickens include sneezing, wheezing, coughing, and runny nose and eyes. The miserable patient also suffers fatigue and loss of appetite. With the exception of a few strains of avian influenza, you can’t catch a cold from your chicken, and vice versa.
Causes of Respiratory Illness in Adult Chickens
Disease
Occurrence in Backyard Flocks
Distinctive Signs of Illness
Average Mortality Rate
Mycoplasmosis
Common
Foamy eye discharge, more common in winter, roosters usually
show more severe signs
Usually none
Infectious coryza
Common
Swollen face or wattles, gunky eyes, foul odor, more common
summer and fall
5–20 percent
Infectious bronchitis
Common
Decreased egg production
Usually none
Newcastle disease
Mild strains are common.
Chickens
Articles
A healthy adult person has little to fear from keeping chickens, but those with impaired immune systems due to age, cancer, HIV infection, diabetes, or other medical conditions should resist the impulse to bring home cute, fluffy chicks from the feed store. Raising chickens may not be a wise pursuit for them.
Several chicken-borne diseases are unpleasant for healthy adults, but they can cause severe illness and death in people with weak immune systems.
Chickens
Articles
So what is the answer to the age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, here, you start with the chicken and end up with an egg. Along the way, you discover the reproductive ins and outs of chickens.
When chickens reach sexual maturity
Young female chickens (pullets) of modern breeds, such as commercial strains of Leghorns, start laying eggs at around 18 to 21 weeks of age and are 8 months old when they reach peak egg production.
Chickens
Articles
Have you seen chiggers, fleas, and bedbugs on your chickens? Take a look at a lineup of a few other suspects. These are part-time pests, jumping on chickens for a meal and then bailing off. They may be a problem where you live. These bugs aren’t fussy — they’ll pester you as well as your chickens.
Credit: Illustration by Barbara Frake
Bedbugs
Yes, this is the same bedbug that lives in people’s homes and attacks them.
Chickens
Articles
Here are ten of the most famous backyard flock-keeping myths. Busting these myths may burst some bubbles of wishful thinking, but hopefully, it also will ease some unnecessary worries.Mixing a new, healthy-looking chicken with the flock is safe.Many types of organisms that cause diseases in chickens can live hidden within a chicken, causing no signs of illness, or causing signs that are so mild that no one notices them.
Chickens
Articles
Having a firm understanding of a chicken’s digestion system can help you figure out the reason behind a chicken’s digestive upsets. The figure shows the layout of the chicken digestive system, beginning to end.
Credit: Illustration by Kathryn Born
Mouth: A chicken can’t physically stick out her tongue or say “Ahh,” so you may never see the inside of a chicken’s mouth.
Chickens
Articles
You need to understand the chicken immune system, to familiarize you with that defense network, because flock owners need to know how to help their chickens protect themselves against and deal with infectious diseases. A bird has built-in defenses against invading disease-causing organisms, such as bacteria or viruses.
Chickens
Articles
Being able to refer to the common names of the outside parts of the chicken is helpful when describing a problem to someone long distance and to ensuring the health of your flock.
Credit: Illustration by Kathryn Born
Eyes: Chickens have better vision than people, by several measures. Their ability to bring objects into sharp focus and to notice very small differences in color is better than human vision, even in newly hatched chicks.
Chickens
Articles
The main job of the respiratory system of birds is to absorb oxygen and rid the body of carbon dioxide. In addition, the respiratory system also gets rid of excess heat, detoxifies some of the waste products of the body, and makes noise — most noticeably, crowing noise, much to the annoyance of our neighbors.Like humans, birds have a windpipe and two lungs, but from there, birds are distinctly unlike mammals.
Chickens
Articles
Besides the obvious role of holding up the chicken, the skeletal system has at least two additional important functions: calcium storage, and believe it or not, breathing!
Credit: Illustration by Kathryn Born
Two types of bones make up the bird skeletal system:
Pneumatic: These bones (say it: new-matic) are hollow and connected to the respiratory system via the air sacs.
Chickens
Articles
A chicken egg is a complete package of nutrition and protection for the developing embryo chick. The yolk, egg white, and shell provide all the nutrients the embryo needs for the 21-day incubation period.
The embryo develops from the ovum, a small white dot on the surface of the yolk, which contains half the genes of a new chick.