Easy Natural Chicken Cold Medicine

I'm not sure if its the wacky weather or what, but it seems like everyone I know has been having sinus trouble.

Chickens included!

Chickens are prone to a number of respiratory ailments, but, like people, the most common is a "cold". There are different causes for "colds",  and they range in severity from a sniffle to swelling the bird's eyes shut and even causing blindness and death. We lost a few really nice birds several winters ago due to a bad cold and us having a hard time keeping the ice off the water bowls. So when I saw them starting to sneeze and sniffle a couple weeks ago, I knew we needed to do something!

Sometimes antibiotics will help, but I really prefer to not use antibiotics if I can help it, just because I don't want to make the "bugs" more drug resistant and I don't like having to be concerned about messing up their digestion by killing off the good AND the bad. Plus, very few antibiotics are labeled for chickens, so you have to, A. try and figure out which one will actually help the problem your birds have, and B. figure out the dosage for a quart of water when it's packaged in a bag that makes 100 gallons. 

So, I decided to try the natural route first. I'd had a little success in getting rid of my own cold with garlic and cider vinegar, so that had to be in the mix. I didn't have any Oil of Oregano which a lot of health nut people swear by, but I assumed the oregano plant we had outside must have some curative properties. So I gathered all my stuff and embarked on an experiment!

Fresh Oregano, Garlic, Vinegar, Red Pepper Flakes

A lot of poultry old-timers swear by Red Pepper as a sort of cure-all for chickens. Its supposed to help with colds, get hens to lay, and "pep up" roosters. They do definitely enjoy it and it does seem to make them feel good. Plus if you get it at a bulk food store it's really cheap. (And good on pizza. But thats another story!)

So I put the handful of oregano that I hacked off the plant, a couple tablespoons of garlic, about 1 1/2 cups of vinegar and about a tablespoon of the pepper all in the blender and pulverized it.

Looks kinda gross

I pulled a soda bottle out of the recycling bin and rinsed it out and used a funnel to pour the concoction into it. 

It smells a little like salad dressing!

So then I filled the bottle up the rest of the way with plain water. Shook it up and put it in the fridge.

Finished "chicken tea"

Since most of our chickens are in smaller breeder pens, we use 1 quart bowls for their water. When we give the tea we pour in a little splash, just enough to tinge the water. The birds seem to enjoy it somehow!

They are still sneezing some, but we haven't been very consistent about giving it to them every day. They aren't ruffled like some were when I first noticed the problem, and they seem to be feeling pretty good! Originally a couple hens had some obviously swollen sinuses and they don't have that problem now!

I would definitely try this if your birds have a cold. It took about 5 minutes to make. Heck, it would probably work for people as well, but it doesn't taste good at all.

(Yeah, I tried it.)

What home remedies do you use for your birds? 

Adventures With Milly-the-Goat

Lots of children's books promise adventures with farm animals, and fun and pleasant things normally happen in these stories. In real life, "adventures" with farm animals aren't quite like that. 

Like this past week with Milly-the-Goat. Milly is kinda the black sheep of our goats. She's kinda a loner, and the others beat up on her. But she is very sweet and friendly with people, so she is J's favorite. 

On Wednesday I decided to clean chicken pens, because the weather was nice and warm. So I grabbed my tools and a beer and went out and started working. I penned up all the goats in the outside pen, locked Milly in the barn, and got to work.

Well, Milly got out of the barn and came out to "help" me. She kept getting into the chicken feed and bedding, but I didn't really think much of it. I kept chasing her off and went back to work.

The next morning after I was at work, J called me to say Milly didn't look right and she had a dirty backside. 

Great.

I'm still pretty new to the goat thing and I don't know goat problems like I do chicken aliments. So I texted back and forth with my mom, who suggested a few different things and I planned to check on her when I got home.

When I got home Milly was standing out in the sun, and she didn't look too awful. But she did look fat (for her, she's a skinny little goat) and she had obviously scoured some. (Scours is what you call diarrhea in the farm world.) Hmm.

I called Mama again, and while we were talking I noticed Milly kept burping her cud up and swallowing right away, over and over again. She didn't seem to enjoy it. Heck, watching her do it like that was starting to make me feel a little queasy too!

Mama said to just leave her for a little bit and then check on her later. So that's what I did.

A couple hours later Milly had some obvious bloating and she was still doing the "weird burp thing". Ruminants, like cows, goats, and sheep, can't throw up but I'm pretty certain that's what Milly wanted to do at this point. And at this point I was starting to get worried. Maybe a little panicked. That "you don't know what the hell you're doing!" feeling was cropping up.

I wasn't even sick and I wanted my mommy.

Well, I guess I sounded like that on the phone, because she came on over, bearing a Downton Abbey totebag filled with sheep supplies, wearing mud covered blue jeans and workboots.

"I took so long because I had to stop at Food Lion. They looked at me a little weird," she explained.

That's my mom!

So we began doctoring Milly. First, we took her in the barn away from the dogs and tried to get her to burp some but that was making her uncomfortable. So we decided to try tubing her, by putting a little tube that's meant for tube-feeding lambs and kids down her throat and hopefully getting some gas out that way.

That helped, then while the tube was still in we poured in some peanut oil and some activated charcoal. The oil helps to release the gas bubbles in the gut and it also kinda lubes things up so they'll start moving right again. The activated charcoal does for animals what it also does for humans - it adsorbs toxins that she may have ingested.

She didn't approve of all this nonsense and so she bit the tube in half, and Mama had to stick her fingers down the goat's throat to catch the tube before Milly swallowed it!

Then Milly got a belly rub and she burped a lot, and we could see her sides go down. After a couple laps around the yard on a leash, she was looking much better. We put her in a little pen in the barn and Mama went home.

At choretime I gave her some Survive! lamb and goat drench, which has a lot of nutrition and vitamins in it, and some Probios, which is a paste that contain lots of probiotics, to help jumpstart her digestion. She was looking perkier, and I went to bed. 

In the morning, she was a little fat again, but a walk solved that. I also gave her some more oil and charcoal all by myself, and I didn't get it on my work pants! I felt very accomplished, especially because it was 6 AM!

In the afternoon, Milly jumped the fence and got out, and there hasn't been any bloat since. She still isn't acting quite right, but it went from being 70 degrees the day she got sick to snowing 3 days later, so I kinda think that isn't helping anything. Plus I forgot to give her mosr Probios until today, so maybe that's part of it. She's eating some and everything, she's just still not 100%. But she's also learned that if she looks pathetic she gets spoiled... more details in Adventures with Milly the Goat Part 2!

Milly not feeling good

The next day!

Ewww... You're Gonna Get Bird FLU!

I have heard this line so many times. My response?

"if I was gonna get bird flu, I woulda had it a LONG time ago!"

Its probably true. My parents got their first chickens about 19 years ago, and Ive been playing with chickens (and ducks, turkeys, quail, parakeets, finches, pigeons, pheasants, chukkars, parrots, you name it) ever since. 

Which makes me a little weird. (How many 18 year old girls have you met who have 10 cage birds in their bedroom, 2 incubators in their closet and around 70 chickens and other fowl outside? Well, that was me.) Heck, the vet just called me his "favorite crazy chicken lady".

But the point of this wasn't about how weird I am. You'll figure that out soon enough. Its that I really don't have to worry about getting bird flu.

For one thing, there have been no human cases of the notorious H5N1 avian ("bird") flu in the United States.  For another, we have a LOT of protocol ensuring our safety. 

All birds brought into this country have to be quarantined and tested before they can go on to wherever they are going. But thats not all! The reason the vet (and not "just" the local vet, this is a vet from the state Dept of Agriculture) was here today is that we are going to attend an out of state show next week and to cross state lines, our birds have to be tested for Avian Flu and Pullorum/Typhoid. This is the case for all poultry, even the big semi loads that come into the state to be processed.

Positive cases are extremely rare, especially in small flocks like ours, presumably because they are under less stress and we see each bird more so we would catch a problem early. But testing helps too because positive birds are tested further to confirm and then culled, thus cutting down on the spread of the disease. Pullorum/Typhoid, two forms of Salmonella, have been almost eliminated through the National Poultry Improvement Plan, or the NPIP. 

The people who test for P/T are frequently Field Testers, people, like me, who have gone to a class and gotten certified to test for the disease for the state. You take a very small sample of blood by pricking the big vein that runs along the underside of the wing, (which is harder than it sounds) and mix a drop of blood with a drop of a special kind of antigen on a tile. If the bird was to have P/T, spots would show up in the mixture. (You would then have to contact the state vet and they would quarantine the birds and do more testing - I haven't had this happen.) Then you fill out the paperwork and the bird owner can show or ship their birds.

For Avian Flu, in Virginia, a veterinarian has to test. They simply open the bird's beak (again, sometimes easier said than done!) and swab the bird's throat with a cotton swab. The swabs are then put into a solution and when they get back to the lab the solution is tested. After all the samples are tested and found negative they print off the results and they mail you a form to take with you to the show.

Granted, birds still slip through the system. A lot of birds wind up untested at swaps, although the vets have done a good job of coming to test at least a sample of the birds being sold. There's a lot of people who don't like their birds being tested, because I suppose they feel its an invasion of privacy. But its a good thing to get your birds tested, because eventually, hopefully, it will make this all a lot safer for all of us.

And all my friends who think chickens are weird (which is a lot, and you know who you are) will quit saying

"You're gonna get BIRD FLU!"