Taking on the chook challenge

Having unexpectedly acquired a flock of backyard chickens, Naomi Arnold discovers a whole new world of responsibility.

WHEN WE BOUGHT a house on a few hectares of land last November, the property came complete with oldfashioned apple and pear trees, stacks of firewood and two brown shaver hens. My mother quickly saw a chance to offload her own three hens, and Ruby, Lucy and Hazel joined Lizzie and Flossie. Having only ever owned dogs and cats before, I was now suddenly responsible for an instant backyard flock. I liked their homely presence, gentle clucks, vigorous scratching and general air of busyness, and of course the fresh eggs. But I knew nothing about how to care for them.

It’s not an uncommon story and, sadly, nor are cavalier attitudes to the health and wellbeing of these most useful of domestic pets. So how many veterinarians have the expertise to advise on the care of chickens, when it’s often sorely needed?

“The answer is probably not enough,” says Dawn Mills, who along with Neil Christensen, a registered specialist in poultry medicine, will soon hold an NZVA CPD course on backyard chickens.

“Hopeless, not to put too fine a point on it,” Neil says in relation to the veterinary advice and treatment offered to the poultry fancy (people who show

their birds) and small commercial flock owners. Neil spent 14 years at Massey University lecturing on poultry. “Some former students have told me they wish they’d paid more attention.”

Both Dawn and Neil lament that some veterinary clinics have to say “We don’t do poultry” when clients with crook chooks come calling. Large commercial poultry businesses in New Zealand have their own veterinarians, and can source expertise from overseas. But Dawn says there are a lot of smaller, semicommercial egg-laying flocks of 99 or fewer whose owners sell eggs at farmers’ markets and the like – and they definitely need veterinary expertise (100 hens is the number at which the Ministry for Primary Industries [MPI] requires you to have a registered risk management programme for poultry food safety).

Chickens have lived close to humankind for more than 8,000 years, and in the modern context having chickens in backyards has been trending around the world for some years now. Although statistics on New Zealand’s backyard flocks don’t seem to be kept by anyone, including Stats NZ, MPI, SPCA, Poultrynz and the Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand, a 2012 poultry industry report

to MPI (then the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry) estimated that up to 10% of the national egg-laying flock of more than three million comprised backyard and small semi-commercial flocks.

One very rough estimate of the size of the national backyard flock can be found in the New Zealand Feed Manufacturers Association’s production figures. In 2018 it provided bagged feed for approximately 600,000 non-commercial birds per year, which included backyard chickens and small commercial operators. That figure has nearly doubled since 2004. There are also more than 13,000 backyard chicken traders and 16,000 trades happening through the Trade Me website every year.

make a helpful contribution to composting and weed control, and are a valuable part of a locavore, no-waste ethos. Along with domestic skills like sourdough-making, knitting, pickling and heritage-vegetable growing, backyard chicken-keeping has become the grandmotherly skill that many people wish hadn’t skipped a generation. Some, of course, never forgot the skills in the first place.

In this environment, chickens are increasingly becoming companion animals rather than production animals, and some clients are demanding high levels of care for them.

“There’s definitely a lack of expertise for attending these people,” Dawn says, although she points out that not all poultry owners are interested in going down the high-cost road for easily replaceable birds.

She also has a warning: if New Zealand encounters an exotic disease of poultry, it’s very likely to be in a backyard or sub-commercial flock. According to an unpublished study from Massey University (see page 16) backyard poultry, commercial producers and wild bird populations overlap geographically and, with so much trading of birds going on, the risk of disease introduction and spread is significant.

Backyard chickens have become more popular and there are a lot of chickens strutting around. Younger people, often with families, find hens a pleasant addition to the garden. They provide good examples when teaching children about where their food comes from,

CHICKENS ARE INCREASINGLY BECOMING COMPANION ANIMALS RATHER THAN PRODUCTION ANIMALS,

AND SOME CLIENTS ARE DEMANDING HIGH LEVELS OF CARE FOR THEM.

WANT TO LEARN HOW TO TREAT POULTRY EFFECTIVELY?

Check out the NZVA’s upcoming backyard chooks and other feathered friends CPD course!

THIS COURSE WILL cover a wide range of topics to help you increase your knowledge, shift your practice to preventive medicine and achieve better welfare for your poultry clients’ birds! Whether you are treating one chook, a small flock or even a semi-commercial flock, this course will equip you with the essential skills you need to be an effective poultry veterinarian.

The course will be run by poultry medicine specialist Neil Christensen and Dawn Mills. It will take place online from 6 to 19 July. n

For more information and to register visit www.nzva.org.

nz/event/20avian.

“Commercial flock businesses do a lot of surveillance testing and they’re going to know right away if they have something they shouldn’t. In contrast, a backyard chicken owner might say, ‘I’ve lost 10 chickens in two weeks – why do you think that could be?’ Veterinarians should know how to approach that situation; it could be an exotic disease presentation,” Dawn says.

She cites two reasons for veterinarians steering away from poultry, and indeed caged birds in general. One is an historical lack of interest in these animals.

“Massey University has visiting poultry medicine lecturers, like Neil, but I don’t think the poultry industry is pushed as a career path.”

Secondly, she says, birds are different and people are uncomfortable with them. Because of their incredibly high metabolic rates, they can also cost a lot more in drugs than animals like cats, and that can put many clients off. However, chickens are good practice for more exotic birds.

“Unlike an Amazon parrot or a bird that’s worth $5,000, chickens are common and they don’t have serious weapons; they can peck but it won’t do damage like parrot bites do. They’re also a good size, you can see their veins and they have a reasonable blood volume, you can open their beaks, and they’re replaceable. It’s not nice when a chicken is someone’s pet, but you can get another one tomorrow.

“Philosophically there’s no reason that the same complicated and expensive procedures we do on cats, say, can’t be done for chickens or other birds.”

Dawn believes upskilling on chickens can be a simple matter of learning about common husbandry – topics such as managing internal and external parasites, diets, welfare, cytology, worm egg counts, taking bloods and faecal exams, and learning how to do in-house postmortems.

“It’s not difficult, not like doing complicated orthopaedics. A lot of it is quite basic.”

Laura Schwerdtfeger of The Lifestyle Vet in Auckland once avoided chickens “like the plague”. She’d had several bad experiences with birds early in her career, when she’d take a sick budgie out of their cage only to have them die in her hands – pretty much every veterinarian’s nightmare. But she had to improve her knowledge when she started focusing on lifestyle blocks, and clients wanted their beloved chickens treated as well as their cats and dogs.

“The one thing that was really surprising was how many people actually wanted to treat their birds like their dogs and cats,” she says. “They wanted them hospitalised, medicated.”

She now works on difficult cases of bumblefoot, sees a lot of lead toxicity (from old lead paint), has worked out how to do chicken anaesthesia, hospitalises some birds and treats species such as emu – who can certainly do a lot more damage to your viscera than chickens.

Getting there took a change in mindset followed by self-education.

“I went from deciding not to do any avian medicine to deciding to help my clients by providing the quality veterinary care that I do for other lifestyle-block animals,” she says.

Laura consulted the Veterinary Information Network (VIN), talked to colleagues, contacted people who did a lot of bird work, and found Massey University “extremely helpful” with advice.

“It really came down to spending extra time studying so that I felt comfortable with what to do and could provide a high level of care. I didn’t want to provide an average level of care for animals I knew nothing about.”

Another veterinarian who’s happily taught herself about chicken care is Charleen Baker of Town and Country Veterinary Services in Drury Village, Auckland. Charleen owns chickens and ducks herself, and chickens are frequent ‘calf club’ pets in the region. She agrees with Dawn that good husbandry is one of the best tools available.

“A lot of problems that chickens get are husbandry related, and you can tick off about five diseases that you’ll see chickens for.”

The highly contagious viral infection Marek’s disease is her number one diagnosis for lame chickens. If it’s not that or trauma, it’ll be ulcerative pododermatitis or bumblefoot. Others are egg yolk peritonitis, coccidiosis and other internal and external parasites.

Before sending a bird on for a referral, Charleen tries to do as much as she can herself by taking a thorough history and physical exam, then trawling VIN for an answer or a plan. She particularly enjoys making protective chicken jandals for cases of bumblefoot. “You can become conversant in chickens pretty quickly,” Charleen says.

“I love the fact that it’s something different; it’s just outside your everyday cats and dogs and you have to think outside the box.”