One sick chicken

With a few exceptions, the animals on my farm are not pets. My sheep and chickens have jobs to do -- eating grass and bugs, making eggs and meat and babies. If they don't do their job, they don't stay on my farm.

My Buff Orpington in happier, healthier days.

That isn't to say that I don't treat them well or care what happens to them. In stark contrast to the images we see of factory farms like Jack DeCoster's, where dead animals rot on the floor (not to mention are routinely deprived of body parts including beak tips, tails, and teeth), I'd like to think I'm pretty quick to notice if one of them isn't feeling well and take steps to alleviate the problem. But while I do my best to take care of it, I don't treat sick livestock in the same way I would treat Arrow the dog or Clementine the housecat if they were sick. I'm not above giving medicine if it's not expensive, but taking a chicken to a vet for surgery?

Recently we noticed that one of the chickens had something funny going on. An over-large bulge on the right side of her chest filled with liquid and swung when she walked. A quick check of the internets led to the diagnosis of "impacted crop," which is caused by a blockage in the digestive tract. I read that eating long blades of grass can be a culprit, and this particular bird had been confined with another sick bird for a few days, during which time I had fed them long grass. A mistake you can bet I won't repeat.



I’d do more to save this lamb than a chicken, but not because he’s cuter.

What I did for the chicken isn't the outer limit for how far I would go to save its life, but I don't think I'd spend much -- and vet trips can get pricey fast. The sheep are a little different in my mind, because we have a lot more invested in each animal. Healthy ewes will produce lambs for six years or more, and their replacement cost is not insubstantial, so I have a greater stake in keeping them well. The ram we're considering will cost us a few hundred dollars, so I'd probably spend even more than I would on an ewe to keep him well enough to do his job.

Once again, it comes down to the fact that a farm is a business. I expect to lose money at the beginning, but raising animals eventually needs to create a profit. If it doesn't, I should either raise my prices, do a better job of marketing, or get out of the livestock business.

Giving medical attention to an animal that needs it is one of the reason I've hesitated about becoming "Certified Organic." USDA organic rules state that if an animal is given any number of prohibited medicines during its life, it cannot be sold as Certified Organic. Yet these same rules require organic farmers to treat animals that are sick.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, medications like antibiotics are wildly overused in livestock and produce unintended consequences like resistant strains of bacteria. On the other, very young lambs get sick sometimes, and treating them is the right thing to do. Medicine given to a baby lamb is long gone by the time it's ready for the butcher. It's unfair to expect a farmer to sacrifice the organic premium for the duration of the animal's life.

It's important to keep the standards for organic strong, and you'll never hear me advocate otherwise. However, there's definitely a size of farm under which I would feel comfortable with a conscientious organic farmer using nonhuman-classed antibiotics to treat a sick animal, as long as they kept it out of the food stream for an appropriate amount of time. Likewise, there are other farmers who I wouldn't trust with a sack full of vitamins. But regulators can't write rules for that.

So for me, I'll stick to my own rule -- I eat meat if I know who raised it, and I trust that their standards are on par with mine. Likewise, I'll spend hours tending to a sick chicken, but the farm wouldn't last long if I also spent hundreds of dollars every time an animal eats too long a blade of grass.

This post also appeared on Grist.

8 Responsesto “One sick chicken”

  1. Good post. This is a good example of why regulators shouldn't be writing rules.

  2. Charles henry says:

    Regulators write rules because of the factory farms that have no regard for animal or human safety and health. Ethical small farmers regulate themselves pretty well but they are a small and shrinking part of our agriculture.

  3. Actually, small farms are a rapidly growing part of the agricultural scene. That is where the growth has been for the past decade. The big farms are shrinking, the small ones have dramatically grown in number and in how much they produce. The good news is this makes it so that more people directly know the source and producer of what they eat.

  4. aimee says:

    I am a homesteader, not a commercial farmer. However the financial considerations are similar - my animals are meant to SAVE me money, not cost me. I will not take a chicken to vet, ever. If the animal is suffering, I'll kill it. If it seems likely to recover, I'll give it every chance. In my experience, chickens don't show symptoms until they are very ill, in fact, mostly they just up and die before I even see anything wrong.

    I also raise goats, and I have taken them to the vet and will continue. I have treated goats for urinary stones, infections, parasites, mastitis, and obstetric emergencies. I have to admit, this is partly a charisma thing - I love my goats, whereas I just don't care as much about chickens. But also, the goats have a much higher replacement cost, and also a healthy female goat will produce a great deal more valuable product than a chicken will over it's life-span. As much as I'd like to be able to treat every animal as a pet, I can't and they aren't.

    As politically incorrect as this is to admit (among my social circle, anyway) my animals are economic units that provide me and my family with concrete, measurable benefits. If their costs outweigh their benefits.. well, I'll support them for a while, in hopes they will recover and their future output will outweigh the current loss... but not for very long. I'll be sad, I might even cry... but I won't waste my family's resources.

  5. Melanie Lei says:

    This is a great post to help the average consumer understand why being USDA “certified organic” is not always a guarantee that a food product is being raised under the best of conditions. One of my friends, who completed a veterinary internship in Lancaster, PA this summer, actually says that the label causes a lot of hassle for farmers and vets because some sick animals aren’t allowed to receive the medications that they truly need to ease their suffering. Many shoppers are unaware of what the label “certified organic” actually means, and while I’d prefer to have my food chemical-free, I also see a need to adapt these regulations in order to allow sick animals to be treated.

  6. Steph Larsen says:

    What's interesting to me is that, at least as I understand it, organic standards in Europe allow for sick animals to get treated with antibiotics (and then taken out of the food supply for awhile). Unfortunately, I don't trust the American organic industry with that kind of responsibility to do the right thing.

  7. Erika says:

    Our vet told us that some certified organic farmers are resorting to cures like injecting colloidal silver and other dicey treatments. I'd rather have a sick animal treated with antibiotics (with proper withholding times) than be poisoned by the organic cure.

    There's a huge difference between treating animals ethically and treating them organically. We've found that in order to be ethical, we can't be organic.

  8. David says:

    Great post. Many small farmers neglect the bottom line. Run it like a business or like a hobby, but don't confuse the two.