06 Oct 2005
Oral Surgery on a Chicken

Mean ChickWe discovered the source of a problem we'd been having with our new chicks yesterday, and had to take some rather disgusting corrective action.

We had lost about 10% of the brood already due to a very mysterious ailment: it was almost as though they chocked to death, but there was no fluid buildup (so no lung diseases) and no other obvious signs of anything wrong. It turns out that the problem was our building materials - we had used some scrap wool as insulation in the old henhouse, which we're now using as a brooder for 100 brown egg layer chicks. The old hens did fine with it - but the chicks thought it great fun to eat the "worms" (strands of wool) and it would clog up their mouths, getting wrapped around their tongue.

We caught one in this condition yesterday, and it was immediately obvious what the problem was. So in the house she came, and I held her beak open while my darling wife used surgical scissors to cut the wool off her tongue... her very tiny tongue, I might add, all while she was struggling to get free and actually spitting (I had no idea chickens could spit) . But she was "cured" ... and we drug all of the wool out of the walls of the henhouse, so we shouldn't have that problem again.

And, no, I found no hen's teeth ... but I did get to write a pretty weird headline!

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