Like yogurt for chicken

Our attitudes toward death have changed since Pasteur proved that many diseases were caused by microorganisms. Before doctors started washing their hands and sterilizing surgical equipment (thanks, Joseph Lister!) 150 years ago, people were more accepting of death. The causes of death from infectious diseases were legion—diphtheria, scarlet fever, plague, malaria, cholera, small pox, measles, and many others. The most tragic, to my mind, was childbed fever, a direct result of doctors going from cadaver work to delivering babies without washing their hands. How many young women died so needlessly?  If you were really lucky, you lived long enough to die of the same thing we die of now—cancer, heart disease, and stroke. But in some cases, if the Victorian novels are to be believed, people died of broken hearts and mysterious fevers pretty often. No matter what, all that could be done was to gather the family around the bedside to watch and pray.

Then, in 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. It became widely available after World War II. Vaccines for most childhood diseases followed. Who dies of infectious diseases anymore? Not many. Within two generations, cheating death has become an integral part of our culture. When someone gets sick, even with a disease that is, at its root, old age, we feel we should Do Something, and we have a reasonable expectation that that Something will be more effective than watching and praying at the bedside.

The first week in December, I rushed our cat Della to the vet because she wasn’t eating much and had grown quite thin. She is 18, which is very, very old in cat years. She had end-stage kidney failure, a common cause of death in elderly cats. I refused a follow-up blood panel ($400, ka-ching) but did ask if I could Do Something to make her comfortable until she died. And that’s why as I write this there is a bag of sterile Ringer’s solution hanging on the lamp next to me by a paper clip and a cable tie. Every evening I insert an 18-gauge needle under her skin and let 100 ml of fluid drip in. In the last few days she’s started eating more. She may live forever.

This last week, Ellie, our very favorite chicken, wasn’t looking good. She too had lost a good deal of weight and hung around the coop listlessly on the cold mornings. This will be good for me, I thought, I will get used to chickens dying. Hilda and I briefly discussed trying to find a chicken vet, but spending that kind of money on something with so short a life span seemed wrong, even if we could find a vet who treated chickens. We will just let her go. We have been lucky to have kept all 10 for so long.

But of course, I still had to ask the question. Can we Do Something?

I typed “weight loss” into the search box of backyardchickens.com. I poked around a little and found a disease called “sour crop.” There wasn’t a lot of scientific information, but I gathered that the crop harbors helpful bacteria that are important in fermenting the chickens’ food to release nutrients. Sometimes the wrong kinds of microbes take over the crop, which can lead to symptoms similar to we were observing. It also gives the chicken bad breath. Who smells their chickens’ breath? The crop should feel like a water balloon instead of a hard lump. I had read about eggs getting stuck, which can cause death. I looked that up as well. It’s called “egg bound” in the business and is readily diagnosed by palpating the back end of the chicken where the egg can be felt in the abdominal cavity.

I was at work when I found all this out. I called Hilda and instructed her to feel the front and back of the chicken, check for odd smells, and isolate Ellie from the rest of the flock in case what she had was contagious. She verified that the crop wasn’t full, but it wasn’t exactly squishy either. She didn’t notice any unusual smell. The rest of the treatment was to withhold food for 24 hours to empty the crop and give Ellie water laced with organic, unfiltered apple cider vinegar (ACV, for those in the know—took me a while to put that together as I scrolled through the discussion board) with the “mother” (fermenting organisms) to lower the pH of the crop to its normal level and kill the bad bugs. After 24 hours, the chicken should be fed full-fat yogurt, which can be mixed with organic applesauce (which the chickens like) to introduce the right bacteria back into the crop. There was controversy about feeding the chickens bread soaked in olive oil. Some recommended it; some felt the risk of encouraging yeast was too high. Several posts recommended scrambled eggs for protein. Cannabalism!

Hilda called back to say that the ACV found in the grocery was the wrong stuff. The kind we needed was sold for horses. I stopped at Tractor Supply on my way home. The man there looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. I checked at the grocery in the same strip mall, but they only had filtered. Finally, believe it or not, I found “all natural” (not organic) unfiltered ACV “with the mother” at WalMart. It would do.

When I got home, Ellie was caged in the garage. We set up the vinegar water and moved the coop cam so we could keep an eye on her from inside the house.  I tried getting her to drink the water from a dropper without success. I put her back in the cage where she began drinking on her own pretty soon.

Ellie and the coop cam watch each other

Ellie settles in for the night. This picture was taken with the coop cam.

And it came to pass that I found myself last night starting a batch of yogurt with whole milk. I make yogurt every weekend without fail, but always with skim milk. This is the first time I ever made yogurt for a chicken. The things we do for love. At least we can Do Something, even though we have no idea if we are even treating the right thing. It remains to be seen if she will pull through.

On a happier note, Terry installed the potbelly wood stove we got from Uncle Dick’s estate in the tractor shed. He can keep the shed toasty warm while he’s working out there. Dick would be pleased, I think.

The wood stove