Snowball’s Chance in Hell
Just as we celebrated the pullets’ birthday and their safe return to their home in Dublin, Snowball began to practice a new dance move. With her neck. It was reminiscent of a snake dance, her head swivelling while her neck curved and twisted.
A moment’s pause to make two notes. One: If you have an ever-so-slight phobia of snakes, do not google snake dance videos. Triggering. Two: Snake dances are not opportunities for ogling a woman’s mostly naked, voluptuous body while really long, thick snakes slither and wrap themselves around her waist, arms, and neck with their forked tongues flickering. In fact, snake dances are rituals to encourage rain and fertility, expressing the link between human and the supernatural, aka nature.
But back to Snowball. Her neck movements were neither voluptuous nor ritualistic. So the next day, I dropped her off at the farm vet, expecting the worst. Instead, the diagnosis was an impacted crop. Nothing a bit of anti-fungal medication won’t take care of: 7 milliliters, twice a day. If it didn’t get better by the following Tuesday, an operation to slit her chest area, push out all the goop that’s accumulated in her crop, and ba da bing. All better.
7 milliliters is a lot of anti-fungal liquid to be getting down a recalcitrant chicken’s throat. Twice a day, more of it was landing on us than in her. I called on Monday and left a message, saying things weren’t going well. I got a call back telling me that the doctor wasn’t going to perform the operation.
Wha-?
Fortunately, I had been in touch with another chicken lover who had had two chickens with impacted crops. She gave me the name of a vet who had performed their procedures. One was not successful. The other, the hen lived another ten years.
I made an appointment with that vet and when I showed them the medication I had been shoving down Snowball’s throat, the expressions on the technicians' faces was gratifying. They made it clear that anti-fungal medication in the amount prescribed was absurd. They commiserated with my weeks-long struggle, thereby winning my heart and unadulterated trust. I took home antibiotics (Amoxyicillin) in pill form with the reassurance that the pill is easily hidden in a nice juicy raspberry and pop! It will go down the hen’s throat! They also ordered Cisapride to be compounded into liquid form and mailed to me; it would loosen things up in her crop and taste like blueberries.
But Snowball is no dumb cluck. She knew that anything I offered her contained something she didn’t want. My hands now represented 7 milliliters of choking goop and an insulting amount of liquid spewed onto her beautiful feathers. So medication-stuffed berries? She was not fooled. Instead, I would crush the pills into a smidge of yogurt to administer with a syringe; easier said than done.
Accosting Snowball, with her wings slapping my face and face-to-beak with her look of disgust and betrayal, she and I would do our own kind of snake dance while I tried to open her beak, put the syringe into her mouth, and press the stuff into her. At which point, it would overflow her beak, dripping out the sides and down her protruding breast. She would miserably swallow and I would just as miserably offer her a treat. Hah! She would turn her back on me, her fluffy butt expressing her disdain.
One week survived and I took her in. Apparently, she no longer had an impacted crop. It had transmogrified into sour crop. No need for an operation, just more medications. And a bra. You know, to support her bulging crop. You can use one of those blue surgical masks we are all too familiar with. Put the loops around her wings and the mask part provides support for her sagging chest. Easy f-ing peasy. I opted for some of our unused cloth masks from Covid times. Such cheerfully colored cloth would surely pass any hen’s fashion requirements.
Not Snowball’s. Those cheerful cloth masks are not pictured here because she removed them from herself as she has everything else I have tried to uplift her sagging chest.
The drama and kerfuffle has continued with myriad other hiccups, not least tossing four dozen light-colored eggs because I didn’t know which were hers and which were the other hens’. (When a hen is on antibiotics her eggs are not fit to eat, especially when she is also on Cisapride, which is not FDA-approved for human consumption. We couldn’t even compost them.)
Snowball now runs at my arrival, but not in bright-eyed and feathery-bottomed anticipation of yellow cheese, as used to happen when we adopted our first chicks. No. She runs in the opposite direction and, when eventually caught, perfects her lock-jawed snake dance.