Chicken Surgery

Today I had to preform surgery on one of our chickens. Two of them had nasty gashes in their necks from one of the roosters (Who is now in the freezer but that is for tomorrow's blog post). Anyway I've been applying poultry wound spray to both of them for a couple of days but there was a flap of skin on one of the wounds and the other hens must have picked at it and opened it way up. When I went to put the wound spray on it today I noticed that the tissue had became necrotic. The two hens that were injured were Turkens, also called "Naked Necks", because of their bare featherless necks. The roosters grab the feathers on a hens neck when they mount them but in the case of the Naked Necks there are no feathers so the rooster grabs the flesh. Then the other hens peck at it.

I briefly thought of trying to reattach the top of the skin flap to the wound but then realized the only thing to do was to cut the flap off because the skin was necrotic, dead. I was concerned about how much blood loss there would be so I grabbed a can of Bag Balm. When we used to castrate pigs we used to stuff the open wound with Bag Balm and they always healed up perfectly and didn't bleed a lot. So I gathered her up and carried her over to a quite place, which just happened to be the bucket of the tractor. I applied wound spray to disinfect the area, took a sterilized razor blade and cut off the flap. It bled a bit so I packed the area with bag balm and it looks much better. I am hoping that it heals well and quickly. I gave her some water with some apple cider vinegar and garlic and will keep applying wound spray and Bag Balm over the next few days. I have my fingers crossed that it heals up well.

 That black flap of skin having down from the wound is dead and needed to be removed. 

The necrotic flap of skin that I cut off

After applying wound spray, removing the necrotic skin and applying bag balm the wound looked much better. I will check it tomorrow and if it is not showing signs of improvement I will ask my vet for advice.  She was good as gold through the whole procedure. I really adore the temperament of these Naked Neck hens.