Can you help our chicken?

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by Maple

Question:

Can you help our chicken it has yellow diarrhea stuff coming out and stuck to her bum. She smells bad too. And constantly sits down.

Also, her feet are very spread apart and has terrible balance. She looks a bit off color and refuses to eat. She is a Rhode Island Red chicken, age three and lives with another chicken of the same breed.

We feed them a variety of chicken grain, rice, grass, bread and pasta.
Can you please help her?

Answer:
The causes of diarrhea in chickens can be:

disease

stress

toxins

worms

antibiotics

poor quality diet

This is just a few examples and often finding the cause is difficult. The simplest solution is to feed the chicken some healthy digestive bacteria.

Live culture yogurt can be offered or purchase a probiotic from the vet or feed store. Make sure your chicken has good feed, with the proper protein content and clean water.

Feeding some cooked rice may help slow down the diarrhea, but won’t cure it. Balancing her digestive tract with good bacteria may cure the problem.

She may be infected with an intestinal disease that requires an antibiotic, or she may have worms. Your local feed store will probably carry products to treat both.

Allowing diarrhea to go on untreated can cause malnutrition, dehydration and death, as well as the possibility of spreading a problem through the flock. It would be good to separate her in a clean dry pen, and give her a heat lamp.

If she is not eating well on her own, you may have to coax her by bringing food to her. If she is not strong enough to want to eat and drink you could give her some Gatorade to drink or a vitamin/electrolyte supplement for chickens, available at most feed stores.

Her lack of strength is most likely due to the diarrhea robbing her of nutrition and hydration, but it could be a more serious disease.

Chicken poop stinks and if it’s accumulating around her vent this may be the source of the smell.

You could bathe her or carefully trim the dirty feathers. Sometimes the feathers can get so caked with feces as to block her ability to poop.

If bad enough this can irritate the skin, cause sores, attract flies that will lay eggs and cause her all kinds of nasty problems.

If you bathe her, make sure to dry her well and keep her nice and warm until fully dry.

It would probably be a good idea to get a sample of her diarrhea to a vet and find out what this is. If it is a contagious disease you may need to treat the whole flock.

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