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bokbokosaurus) wrote2012-05-06 12:13 pm
bokbokosaurus) wrote2012-05-06 12:13 pm
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6 Awful Things No-One Tells You About Keeping Chickens, Part One
I was gonna try and sell this to Cracked.com, but they only accept subjective/personal-experience articles from their regular columnists. So here you go.
6. Your coop overflows. With poop.
Obviously, all animals poop. Digestion and excretion are one of the hallmarks of being a living organism. You will not be prepared, however, for just how much chickens poop. You will stare at the heap your tiny little hen just produced, and you will go... what? How is that even possible? You will stare at diagrams of chicken anatomy, convinced your bird violates all laws of physics and is actually a TARDIS, or possibly contains a portal to another dimension. A dimension of poop. It might possibly have world-saving implications, how tiny raw material in a tiny space can produce so much. If only it applied to anything other than chicken poop.
Chickens mostly poop in their sleep. Normal, well-adjusted chickens will at least sleep on a perch, so the poop falls away from them. Ex-battery hens, on the other hand, don't know about perching, and may well have leg/foot problems. They will sleep in the nestboxes. And shit the bed all night.
As prey animals, chickens have learnt to hide signs of illness at all costs. How do you tell if your hen is ill? Well, Scrubs was right. Everything does, in fact, come down to poo. Lucky you!
On top of all this, chickens have a paired caecum. Mammals only have one, but chickens have two, because fuck you, that's why. The caecum probably does all sorts of important intestinal things, but all you need to know is that it's a brewer's vat for the most evil poops on the planet. About once a day, your chicken will do a poop that's liquid, kind of orange, and possibly foamy. It will stink so bad you think terrorists have launched a chemical weapon attack. You will rush to the internet in a panic, convinced your hen is dying, and spend far too long examining galleries of normal and abnormal poops (Not Safe For Lunchtime). That's your good friend the caecum, letting you know it's working just fine and everything's peachy keen.
5. Poop and eggs aren't the only things that come out of there.
If you've been very, very bad, and the forces of the universe want to punish you particularly badly, your hen may lay a lash. Sadly, this has nothing to do with rum and sodomy.
These are particularly likely in ex-battery hens, as they are usually a sign that the hen's reproductive tract is poorly or just generally getting worn out. Battery hens are hybrids selected to produce an egg a day for a year, which takes a lot out of them, with no expectation that the hen will survive past that, so they are much more prone to laying problems than most.
Basically, your hen lays a chunk of offal. You go to collect the eggs of a morning, and find an alien meat thing instead. I am not responsible for your lunch, or your future ability to eat scotch eggs, if you look at the horrible pictures. People who are stronger than me, after recovering from the immediate projectile vomiting, have cut open the lash, to find layers of meat and sometimes a yolk inside. Then they projectile-vomit some more, on account of the smell.
So what the hell is it, apart from proof of the non-existence of a loving God? Most people reckon it's a chunk of the lining of the oviduct. Some people, who don't believe in sparing us from horrible nightmares, say chickens have been known to pass an entire diseased ovary. Either way, something that should be on the inside is now on the outside, and it ain't going back.
4. First Aid is the Worst Aid
As mentioned above, ex-battery chickens in particular are worn-out birds that were never meant to live this long. As such, their prognosis is not great, and few vets are confident in their treatment. Add her total lack of educational life-experience to a chicken's natural stupidity, and you have an animal that can get herself into a lot of trouble. Which you will need to sort out.
Chickens are, in general, great at trolling you. I spent my first few weeks as a chicken-mommy absolutely convinced that one bird or another was about to die on me. Thankfully, none of them did. Three of them were this close to going to the vet before they suddenly went, "What? Nothing to see here. I'm fine. Been fine all day, in fact. *whistles nonchalantly*"
There are a couple of major problems that can be treated at home. Unfortunately, what you gain in vet savings you lose in innocence of the soul. I will now describe them, not as a set of step-by-step instructions that you should follow, but so you can appreciate their sheer comedic awfulness.
The first of these is crop impaction (and its successor, sour crop). The first part of the chicken's digestive system is the crop, which is essentially a bag where food gets all mashed together and ground up by grit. (The chicken has to eat gravel before she can eat anything else. This should be your first clue that this system can go badly wrong, and in fact is proof of the non-existence of an intelligent designer.) Long stringy food (eating straw bedding is a favourite), or insufficient grit, can lead to the formation of hairball-like clumps that block the crop and don't go anywhere. Leave them long enough, and you get a fungal infection called sour crop, which is diagnosed by sniffing the chicken's breath for grimdark stank, because the your life is just like that sometimes, kiddo, and nobody ever promised you any better. And yes, the chicken will attempt to bite your face off while you're diagnosing. Before taking the bird to the vet, you can try to shift the blockage yourself. Or, to be less clinical and more honest, you can make the bird puke. This is obviously a delicate, specialist procedure, perhaps involving medicine. Nah, just kidding. You feed the chicken some oil, then hold her upside-down and poke at the crop till all the bad stuff falls out of her gob. Then the chicken looks at you like you're the worst person ever.
The second, more horrifying, case is the prolapsed vent, which occurs at the other end. You may find it helpful to regard the chicken as essentially a complicated tube, the middle of which brews disasters for either end. For instance, sometimes, chicken arses just turn inside-out. Sometimes, the insides are on the outside. This is another problem more likely to occur in ex-battery hens, who are tired old ladies whose reproductive tracts have been worked too hard. Essentially, the treatment is to clean it up, push it back in and pray. Horrifying photos? But of course. Again, the still-conscious chicken will look at you like you're the worst person ever, and this time you will privately agree with her. Keep chickens! You might end up stuffing their internal organs back into their bumholes, and won't that be fun for all concerned?
Continued in part two.
6. Your coop overflows. With poop.
Obviously, all animals poop. Digestion and excretion are one of the hallmarks of being a living organism. You will not be prepared, however, for just how much chickens poop. You will stare at the heap your tiny little hen just produced, and you will go... what? How is that even possible? You will stare at diagrams of chicken anatomy, convinced your bird violates all laws of physics and is actually a TARDIS, or possibly contains a portal to another dimension. A dimension of poop. It might possibly have world-saving implications, how tiny raw material in a tiny space can produce so much. If only it applied to anything other than chicken poop.
Chickens mostly poop in their sleep. Normal, well-adjusted chickens will at least sleep on a perch, so the poop falls away from them. Ex-battery hens, on the other hand, don't know about perching, and may well have leg/foot problems. They will sleep in the nestboxes. And shit the bed all night.
As prey animals, chickens have learnt to hide signs of illness at all costs. How do you tell if your hen is ill? Well, Scrubs was right. Everything does, in fact, come down to poo. Lucky you!
On top of all this, chickens have a paired caecum. Mammals only have one, but chickens have two, because fuck you, that's why. The caecum probably does all sorts of important intestinal things, but all you need to know is that it's a brewer's vat for the most evil poops on the planet. About once a day, your chicken will do a poop that's liquid, kind of orange, and possibly foamy. It will stink so bad you think terrorists have launched a chemical weapon attack. You will rush to the internet in a panic, convinced your hen is dying, and spend far too long examining galleries of normal and abnormal poops (Not Safe For Lunchtime). That's your good friend the caecum, letting you know it's working just fine and everything's peachy keen.
5. Poop and eggs aren't the only things that come out of there.
If you've been very, very bad, and the forces of the universe want to punish you particularly badly, your hen may lay a lash. Sadly, this has nothing to do with rum and sodomy.
These are particularly likely in ex-battery hens, as they are usually a sign that the hen's reproductive tract is poorly or just generally getting worn out. Battery hens are hybrids selected to produce an egg a day for a year, which takes a lot out of them, with no expectation that the hen will survive past that, so they are much more prone to laying problems than most.
Basically, your hen lays a chunk of offal. You go to collect the eggs of a morning, and find an alien meat thing instead. I am not responsible for your lunch, or your future ability to eat scotch eggs, if you look at the horrible pictures. People who are stronger than me, after recovering from the immediate projectile vomiting, have cut open the lash, to find layers of meat and sometimes a yolk inside. Then they projectile-vomit some more, on account of the smell.
So what the hell is it, apart from proof of the non-existence of a loving God? Most people reckon it's a chunk of the lining of the oviduct. Some people, who don't believe in sparing us from horrible nightmares, say chickens have been known to pass an entire diseased ovary. Either way, something that should be on the inside is now on the outside, and it ain't going back.
4. First Aid is the Worst Aid
As mentioned above, ex-battery chickens in particular are worn-out birds that were never meant to live this long. As such, their prognosis is not great, and few vets are confident in their treatment. Add her total lack of educational life-experience to a chicken's natural stupidity, and you have an animal that can get herself into a lot of trouble. Which you will need to sort out.
Chickens are, in general, great at trolling you. I spent my first few weeks as a chicken-mommy absolutely convinced that one bird or another was about to die on me. Thankfully, none of them did. Three of them were this close to going to the vet before they suddenly went, "What? Nothing to see here. I'm fine. Been fine all day, in fact. *whistles nonchalantly*"
There are a couple of major problems that can be treated at home. Unfortunately, what you gain in vet savings you lose in innocence of the soul. I will now describe them, not as a set of step-by-step instructions that you should follow, but so you can appreciate their sheer comedic awfulness.
The first of these is crop impaction (and its successor, sour crop). The first part of the chicken's digestive system is the crop, which is essentially a bag where food gets all mashed together and ground up by grit. (The chicken has to eat gravel before she can eat anything else. This should be your first clue that this system can go badly wrong, and in fact is proof of the non-existence of an intelligent designer.) Long stringy food (eating straw bedding is a favourite), or insufficient grit, can lead to the formation of hairball-like clumps that block the crop and don't go anywhere. Leave them long enough, and you get a fungal infection called sour crop, which is diagnosed by sniffing the chicken's breath for grimdark stank, because the your life is just like that sometimes, kiddo, and nobody ever promised you any better. And yes, the chicken will attempt to bite your face off while you're diagnosing. Before taking the bird to the vet, you can try to shift the blockage yourself. Or, to be less clinical and more honest, you can make the bird puke. This is obviously a delicate, specialist procedure, perhaps involving medicine. Nah, just kidding. You feed the chicken some oil, then hold her upside-down and poke at the crop till all the bad stuff falls out of her gob. Then the chicken looks at you like you're the worst person ever.
The second, more horrifying, case is the prolapsed vent, which occurs at the other end. You may find it helpful to regard the chicken as essentially a complicated tube, the middle of which brews disasters for either end. For instance, sometimes, chicken arses just turn inside-out. Sometimes, the insides are on the outside. This is another problem more likely to occur in ex-battery hens, who are tired old ladies whose reproductive tracts have been worked too hard. Essentially, the treatment is to clean it up, push it back in and pray. Horrifying photos? But of course. Again, the still-conscious chicken will look at you like you're the worst person ever, and this time you will privately agree with her. Keep chickens! You might end up stuffing their internal organs back into their bumholes, and won't that be fun for all concerned?
Continued in part two.