I have a hard time with the age culling thing personally. I never have more than 40 so is not a real issue here. I let them "retire", usually find them a couple years after retirement, peacefully expired, and then they go into the back pasture for the local wildlife to recycle.
These are mostly questions for my daughter. She is considering expanding the flock.
I'm leaning toward peacocks. I enjoy my chickens, not clingy and certainly not cuddly girls, but aren't afraid, come when called or bag shaking, and are hand tamed for handling needs, meds and emergent...
Oh i couldn't guess. It just looked exactly like what my poor boy went through.
I feel really bad for both of you - empathy!
If you were closer I'd ask for a sample for my Microscope.
I do know one of the bigger concerns i would have would be the infection going systemic. High powered...
I'll not at all familiar with those, but i learned a hard lesson with the sorghum, so now i research the feeds i choose, lol. 40 plus hens, less than 8 eggs daily. For a year. Crazy. Now i tend to get a bit preachy about sorghum, so apologies!
I have to agree. It really looks like the exterior tumor fell off (the bump you spoke of) but the cancer continued to spread.
I'm sorry you and your duck are dealing with this. One of my pet rats had the same scenario.
And yes, the maggots actually could help but they must be supervised...
Funny i bought yaheetech rat cages . They were horrid - absorbed every drop of fluid and reeked within two days. No amount of cleaning helped.
Now I'm turning them into bookcases, lol . They no longer reek, oc. Bleached within an inch of dissolving and two months outdoors!
About 3 years ago, agricorps started replacing corn with sorghum sourced from 3rd world countries. Its a lot cheaper. There were multiple studies done vowing no differences... studies funded by agricorps. NHIS is one of two i found that were objective.
I did a big article on it in this site...
The good news is mites don't like humans too much so you might get a mite bite but the real emergency is the stock.
I'm in far northern Maine and mites are godawful this year.
I moved all my birds into sterile containers and took all bedding and boxes out. I SOAKED my buildings in Ortho Home...
Yup. My Australorp is really bossy and not the least bit timid, though not aggressive to the other girls at all. They are a big breed, at least ones I've had, and she is larger than her littermates of various ages, even the older ones. So maybe she's just leggy? I would expect more comb on a...
IM a fanatic about NOT using sorghum in any form. I feed the Nature wise AllFlock from TSC.
It's a bit more pricey, but they are getting better nutrition so there's less waste and less gorging. I did a years worth of research and experiments on sorghum and on diatomaceous earth (diff story)...
IM in far northern Maine on the border, but I'm moving back home after 7 years, to Louisiana.
I'm particularly good of the gorgeous fancy ones, several breeds, and know almost nothing except what I've researched. Which is ok, but experienced keepers are a better source.
I don't FB, but i have checked Craigslist a few times. I keep forgetting it ! I check them again.
My problems so far is shipping. There one local man who's a bit uhm.... eccentric? He has hundreds. Sometimes he says he'll sell some of them, then he changes his mind! Not sure about vaccs and...
All my EEs had blue eyes for, maybe a couple weeks? Then they got kinda green. I recall i was freaking out about them perhaps having mareks. Oh boy, the new chicken herder days, lol
There was one female in our group of 22 that we received with a bad leg. I tried bringing her inside for a couple days. She was decidedly unhappy. She gets around quite well, if a bit slowly, with the rest of the covey, so i returned her with no ill effects from her peers.
This iteration we...