Today I went outside to check on Peepers after getting back from a temp job, and was alarmed to see him slumped over on his side in a very unnatural position that basically translated into “I’m dead, or nearly there.”
It was a great relief when he lifted himself up and peeped as I called his name, but that relief was quite overshadowed by the blood all over his head.
Once inside the house, with some of the blood rinsed off, Peepers had trouble opening his eyes. He made peepy sounds when touched or moved, and kept his balance pretty well, but if left alone for a few minutes, he would sort of flop as if he had just fallen asleep.
Recognizing this as a sign of shock, and recalling the countless wild birds I’d collected from bad situations only to watch them go into shock and die within hours, I panicked and took Peepers to the after-hours emergency vet.
The vet cleaned out his wounds, which appear to be claw wounds (thank goodness, not bite wounds, as bite wounds from a cat, at least, are essentially fatal to birds), and gave him some fluids, and told me he needed antibiotics from a “chicken vet.” Apparently the antibiotics they had at the emergency vet are not legal to give to birds that are going to be used for food purposes (eating the chicken or its eggs), and while Peepers is a pet that I would absolutely not think of eating, we had hoped to eat his (her) eggs if he turns out to be a girl. I thought about saying, well, then we won’t eat Peepers’s eggs–but then I realized that if we had two other hens laying eggs some day in the future as we planned, it might become difficult to sort out whose eggs are whose unless Peepers stays isolated from the other hens somehow.
The vet reassured me at that point that waiting on the antibiotics was not going to be the deciding factor for Peepers’s survival. So tomorrow I’ll be calling around for a vet that can administer antibiotics to food chickens.
Assuming Peepers survives the night. It’s hard to say whether he’s truly at death’s door or just plain dead tired. It’s now almost 10 PM, and Peepers’s usual bedtime is about 7 PM (when it gets dim outside), so he’s likely exhausted after the trauma of the attack, the ride to and from the vet, and the vet’s treatment. He’s got his little head tucked under his wing right now, trying to block out the bedroom light and the television sounds.
I am having a very hard time understanding how something managed to get its claws on Peepers. Peepers would have had to have been sound asleep in a corner of the kennel, and the animal (cat, most likely) would have crept up behind him and somehow squeezed its paw through the mesh, the holes of which are the size of a nickle, and then gotten its paw around Peepers’s head. And then realized that the chicken can’t be pulled through the mesh–at least, not in one piece.
A Chicken Story 