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I lost my first chicken today. Steg, my beautifully-feathered mad digger. That's her in the user icon, taken about two weeks after rescue. She was middling in the pecking order when I got her, with a very damaged beak and a huge comb. She blossomed into a lovely hen, with full bum-feathers and cream markings.
She's not the first of my hens to get sick - that was Dippy, last May, mysteriously collapsing in the run and then just as mysteriously recovering. She's the first one where the vet's been pretty sure there was nothing to do for her. She had peritonitis, which is very common in old laying hens - the worn-out oviduct doesn't collect the egg properly, and it falls into the abdomen, gets infected and forms a mass. Get enough, and it puts pressure on the hen's organs, and eventually she can't eat or breathe properly, as well as carting around this dead weight of infected tissue with her. There's some pretty gross pictures on http://www.backyardchickens.com from a user who does her own necroscopies, and has found egg masses in almost all of her commercial laying hybrids.
If it was still at the fluid stage, the vet might have been able to drain it off her, give her antibiotics for the infection, and give her a suprelorin implant to prevent any more eggs from maturing in her ovaries. Unfortunately, Steg was long past that stage. The vet said she might last another week on painkillers. Realistically, there's not much point keeping her alive to sit in a crate in my bathroom with no hope of recovery, so I had her euthanised.
Egg peritonitis and the other common reproductive ailments - stuck eggs, prolapse - are inevitable when hens are bred and worked the way the little brown Rhode Island Red x Light Sussex hybrids used in commecial egg farms are. These girls are bred to lay an egg every single day for their first year and put everything they've got into laying. They tend to come to rescues skinny with broken and deformed bones where all the nutrients available have gone into their eggs rather than their bodies. They never get a break. They're kept in artificial light for most of each day to put off the moult for as long as possible. They're not bred for longevity. A hen from a sensible, traditional mixed-use breed can live for ten years. A laying hybrid can expect to be slaughtered at eighteen months, so the fact they'll be laying bacteria-feasts into their own abdominal cavities at two or three years is neither here nor there.
Steg would have been about three. I got her when she was commercially spent, the day most of the other hens in that farm would have gone for slaughter to make way for younger birds. She had eighteen months with me, which is a long time. The average lifespan for an ex-battery hen is a year after rescue. So she had longer than average, and longer than she would have had if I hadn't taken her in. And I think she got to enjoy her life, and dust-bathe and run around and eat slugs.
I discussed the possibility of implanting all the others with the vet, but he said that while he has good results, he prefers to only do it if the hen is having problems, rather than routinely. Still, it's good to know that the option is there. It's also a very new option, and I'm not sure it's actually licensed for chickens. (It's mostly used in ferrets and dogs.) Hopefully in a few years more people will have more experience with it, the price will come down, and it can become a more routine thing.
She's not the first of my hens to get sick - that was Dippy, last May, mysteriously collapsing in the run and then just as mysteriously recovering. She's the first one where the vet's been pretty sure there was nothing to do for her. She had peritonitis, which is very common in old laying hens - the worn-out oviduct doesn't collect the egg properly, and it falls into the abdomen, gets infected and forms a mass. Get enough, and it puts pressure on the hen's organs, and eventually she can't eat or breathe properly, as well as carting around this dead weight of infected tissue with her. There's some pretty gross pictures on http://www.backyardchickens.com from a user who does her own necroscopies, and has found egg masses in almost all of her commercial laying hybrids.
If it was still at the fluid stage, the vet might have been able to drain it off her, give her antibiotics for the infection, and give her a suprelorin implant to prevent any more eggs from maturing in her ovaries. Unfortunately, Steg was long past that stage. The vet said she might last another week on painkillers. Realistically, there's not much point keeping her alive to sit in a crate in my bathroom with no hope of recovery, so I had her euthanised.
Egg peritonitis and the other common reproductive ailments - stuck eggs, prolapse - are inevitable when hens are bred and worked the way the little brown Rhode Island Red x Light Sussex hybrids used in commecial egg farms are. These girls are bred to lay an egg every single day for their first year and put everything they've got into laying. They tend to come to rescues skinny with broken and deformed bones where all the nutrients available have gone into their eggs rather than their bodies. They never get a break. They're kept in artificial light for most of each day to put off the moult for as long as possible. They're not bred for longevity. A hen from a sensible, traditional mixed-use breed can live for ten years. A laying hybrid can expect to be slaughtered at eighteen months, so the fact they'll be laying bacteria-feasts into their own abdominal cavities at two or three years is neither here nor there.
Steg would have been about three. I got her when she was commercially spent, the day most of the other hens in that farm would have gone for slaughter to make way for younger birds. She had eighteen months with me, which is a long time. The average lifespan for an ex-battery hen is a year after rescue. So she had longer than average, and longer than she would have had if I hadn't taken her in. And I think she got to enjoy her life, and dust-bathe and run around and eat slugs.
I discussed the possibility of implanting all the others with the vet, but he said that while he has good results, he prefers to only do it if the hen is having problems, rather than routinely. Still, it's good to know that the option is there. It's also a very new option, and I'm not sure it's actually licensed for chickens. (It's mostly used in ferrets and dogs.) Hopefully in a few years more people will have more experience with it, the price will come down, and it can become a more routine thing.
