tickens33
Chirping
Hello all, I'll try to keep this short..
My partner and I had 6 chickens (now 5, I guess) on a rural property near the city we live in. When we can't be with the chickens, we check on them with live cellular cameras. This has gone well for us for about a year, including keeping all 6 alive through the winter.
I showed up today to check on the chickens and collect eggs, and saw one (Freida) looking lethargic and listless. Within about 10 minutes of me arriving, she dropped over dead.
Some questions-
1. All the other chickens look fine and are acting completely normal. What, if anything, do I need to focus on regarding disease prevention for the chickens, like do I need to disinfect the coop? This would be a huge undertaking that I'd prefer to avoid, and I can't imagine how I'd be 100% effective with all the nooks and crannies. I also won't have the time to do this for at least 24 hours but maybe more...and I also don't know how it would be possible to effectively disinfect their outdoor run.
2. Are the eggs collected in the past few days safe to eat? I gifted some to a friend about 5 days before Freida died, is he safe to eat them? Should I toss all the eggs from this week? I don't know which chickens laid which eggs so they would all have to go.
3. Other than some diarrhea in her butt feathers(not pasty butt) Freida did not have any illness symptoms that I could tell. She did not appear egg bound. Her crop seemed mostly empty like she hadn't eaten much today. She didn't seem to have bird flu symptoms (I have read about coughing, comb swelling, respiratory problems like sneezing). I saw her on the camera this morning, yesterday, and the day before acting normally. Based on this information and folks' personal experience, does it seem like the most likely cause of death was some internal defect like a heart attack? Or is there something else I need to worry about?
Thank you in advance for any help you're able to provide. I am planning on giving Freida a "woods burial" and letting her go back into the ecosystem as a meal for some other animal, unless anyone here would strongly recommend against doing that for the sake of a necropsy or any other reasons. I will be on the property with my chickens for about an hour more after posting this, so I'm hoping people can respond quickly and I'll try to reply.
My partner and I had 6 chickens (now 5, I guess) on a rural property near the city we live in. When we can't be with the chickens, we check on them with live cellular cameras. This has gone well for us for about a year, including keeping all 6 alive through the winter.
I showed up today to check on the chickens and collect eggs, and saw one (Freida) looking lethargic and listless. Within about 10 minutes of me arriving, she dropped over dead.
Some questions-
1. All the other chickens look fine and are acting completely normal. What, if anything, do I need to focus on regarding disease prevention for the chickens, like do I need to disinfect the coop? This would be a huge undertaking that I'd prefer to avoid, and I can't imagine how I'd be 100% effective with all the nooks and crannies. I also won't have the time to do this for at least 24 hours but maybe more...and I also don't know how it would be possible to effectively disinfect their outdoor run.
2. Are the eggs collected in the past few days safe to eat? I gifted some to a friend about 5 days before Freida died, is he safe to eat them? Should I toss all the eggs from this week? I don't know which chickens laid which eggs so they would all have to go.
3. Other than some diarrhea in her butt feathers(not pasty butt) Freida did not have any illness symptoms that I could tell. She did not appear egg bound. Her crop seemed mostly empty like she hadn't eaten much today. She didn't seem to have bird flu symptoms (I have read about coughing, comb swelling, respiratory problems like sneezing). I saw her on the camera this morning, yesterday, and the day before acting normally. Based on this information and folks' personal experience, does it seem like the most likely cause of death was some internal defect like a heart attack? Or is there something else I need to worry about?
Thank you in advance for any help you're able to provide. I am planning on giving Freida a "woods burial" and letting her go back into the ecosystem as a meal for some other animal, unless anyone here would strongly recommend against doing that for the sake of a necropsy or any other reasons. I will be on the property with my chickens for about an hour more after posting this, so I'm hoping people can respond quickly and I'll try to reply.
