Today is the first day of my poultry rotation and it was kind of weird. We started out the morning by doing nothing. At least it gave me time to check my email and look up the locations of some grocery stores. Then we left right before lunch to drive a few hours to a meeting where a sales guy was pitching some ventilation system to broiler producers. Then, after the vet schmoozed for 20 min after the meeting, we headed to the “field lab” to do a “case”.
A “case” means that a producer is having a problem (usually increased death rate) and they dropped off dead chickens and some live chickens. Usually, we draw blood from the live chickens (to check various things like blood glucose, send in for more testing, etc), then euthanize them (via cervical dislocation…essentially you grab the head in one hand, the feet in the other, pull and twist to separate the neck vertebrae, thus severing the spinal cord…I’m definitely not in favor of cervical dislocation in other species, however, I’ve used euthanasia solution (the stuff they use to euthanize cats and dogs) in production poultry and it doesn’t work…so I’m not sure how else to euthanize them so I’ve come to the fact that I’ll have to learn how to cervically dislocate chickens…and I learned today) :(
Then we perform necropsies (like an autopsy, but on a non-human animal) on all the animals. These necropsies are quick and dirty. We’re looking for big lesions to give us a diagnosis.
Today, we did a “case “ of 3 day old chicks that died from “starve-out”. From talking to the vet and reading, starve-out is when chicks die at 3-4 days of age, when the yolk sac reserves are depleted, from starvation. This can be due to the inability of the chicks to find food or chicks who hatched too early. I’m not sure why chicks hatching too early causes them to die, but oh well.
The second “case” was ~6 day old chicks who were suddenly dying. Some of the chicks had normal blood sugar levels and some had low, so we tentatively diagnosed them as “hypo-glycemic syndrome”, which I can’t find in my books….i think it’s essentially that chicks that young have a high metabolic rate and any stressor can cause them to go off-feed for a bit—which can cause them to suddenly become hypoglycemic, causing death. The vet recommendation to the producer was to add vitamins to the water, and ensure at least 8 hours of darkness every day.
The third “case “ of the day was 13 day old chicks who did not have coccidiosis…haha…I can’t remember what was wrong with them…I don’t think we really found anything.
that's all for today....
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