CHICKEN KISSING MENTIONED HERE!!!

Emerging Infectious Diseases, a scientific journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published yet another scholarly article linking salmonella infections in humans with backyard chickens.  The October issue of this respected publication includes an article entitled “Outbreaks of Human Salmonella Infections Associated with Live Poultry, United States, 1990–2014.”  The epidemiology in this article is pristine and makes a clear connection between people infected with salmonella and their chickens.  But unhappily, there have been several unfortunate consequences of this and other similar CDC studies. 

First of all, the popular press has gotten it’s clutches on this news nugget and raced right for the catchy headline while ignoring the broader underlying message.  Thus we have Huffington Post, under the category of “weird news” shouting “Kissing Chickens Can Spread Salmonella”; while CNN proclaims, “CDC Report Crushes Your Chicken-Kissing Dreams”, and NPR coyly announces, “Chicken Owners Brood Over CDC Advice Not To Kiss, Cuddle Birds”, and Jezebel interjects, “Hey, Don’t Kiss Chickens.”  These headlines would lead one to believe that chicken kissing was the main focus of the study.  Kissing chickens was listed as a high risk behavior, but the percentage of people in the study who got salmonella after kissing chickens (13%) was a fraction of those who acquired salmonella after bringing chickens into their houses (46%).  But then the popular press obviously thinks chicken kissing is just plain weird while bringing a chicken into your house is hardly worth an eye-roll.

The second problem I have with these studies is that after the CDC has demonstrated a real problem, people getting Salmonella from their backyard chickens, it takes the next step and offers solutions.  I’m sure that CDC consulted with a broad range of individuals before proposing solutions, but did it actually talk to anybody in the backyard-chicken-keeping community?  From some of the suggested solutions I suspect that it didn’t.

And that lack of dialogue is creating the third problem:  There is a growing feeling among some in the backyard-chicken-keeping community that the CDC recommendations for safely keeping chickens is just another example of government intrusion into their lives.  One on-line comment:  “They don’t want the general public raising chickens!”  I’ve been waiting for someone to say, “They can have my chickens when they pry them from my cold, dead hands,” but thus far that has not popped up.

So what are the CDC recommendations?  Here they are directly from the CDC website—CDC’s recommendations are bolded, my comments are italicized:

1. Always wash your hands with soap and water right after touching live poultry or anything in the area where they live and roam.  I always wash my hands when I come into the house after having been in the chicken coop.  Do most chicken owners do this?  I’m going to guess, “Probably not.”  But speaking of washing your hands, many people have dogs and cats living right in their houses with them.  There’s probably a LOT of cat and dog petting going on all the time.  Cats and dogs, by the way, can carry about a gazillion diseases that are transmissible to humans.  The top five are hookworm, roundworms, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis, and Lyme disease, but the list goes on to include a whole host of other diseases that are rare but often fatal, including plague (aka Black Death).  So does CDC recommend that you wash your hands each and every time after interacting with your cat or dog?  Well, yes, actually.  Yes they do.  Does anybody do this?  I’m going to guess, “Probably not.”  And what about washing your hands after you’ve been in an area where cats and dogs “live and roam”?  Yeah, right.  Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here - I'm not unloading on cats and dogs--I've got several that live in my house, sleep in my bed, and walk on my face every day.  I'm just taking issue with the way CDC seems to be singling out one domestic animal.
2. Do not let live poultry inside the house, in bathrooms, or especially in areas where food or drink is prepared, served, or stored.  Here’s the deal.  Most backyard chicken keepers know that it is practically impossible NOT to bring chickens into their houses in certain circumstances.  Many folks start their flocks with baby chicks.  Babies need heat, protection from drafts, and a controlled environment that small backyard coops just can’t provide.  I would guess that pretty much everybody starts their babies in a box in the basement.  By the same token, sick or injured birds also need a controlled environment.  The most recent sick chicken to live in my basement was suffering from myiasis, also known as flystrike.  She had maggot infested wounds after flies laid eggs on her.  She needed a fly-free environment—my basement could provide that but my coop could not.
3. Don't let children younger than 5 years, adults older than 65, and people with weakened immune systems handle or touch chicks, ducklings, or other live poultry.  Is there good science behind this recommendation?  Absolutely.  Will everybody say, “Wow!  Look at this impressive science!  I’m gonna get right behind this good advice!”?  Abso-freakin-lutley not!  If you’ve got baby chicks you think your kids aren’t going to want to play with them?  Come on!  I reach the magical age of 65 next year.  The chances of me giving up my flock next year are slim to none - and slim just left town.  As useful advice, this one ranks up there with a bucket of warm spit.
4. If you collect eggs from the hens, thoroughly cook them.  Or if you buy them from a store.  Or get them from a neighbor, or whatever.  Or we could figure out a way to get control of this Salmonella problem and go back to the good old days of homemade mayo, eggnog, and Hollandaise. 
5. Don't eat or drink in the area where the birds live or roam.  Good advice.  And then I go back to the dog and cat thing in #1.
6. Avoid kissing your birds or snuggling them, then touching your mouth.  Good advice.  And then I go back to the cat and dog thing in #1.
7. Stay outdoors when cleaning any equipment or materials used to raise or care for live poultry, such as cages or feed or water containers.  I’ve got running water in my coop, so no prob.  Most people probably have a garden hose at the very least.  So this is doable.  Not bad -  there’s at least one bit of advice in this list that can be practically carried out.
8. Buy birds from hatcheries that participate in the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Poultry Improvement Plan (USDA-NPIP) U.S. voluntary Salmonella Monitoring Program. This program is intended to reduce the incidence of Salmonella in baby poultry in the hatchery.  Yes.  Stop disease at the source.  If you can eliminate Salmonella from hatcheries and guarantee that all those babies people are bringing into their backyards are Salmonella-free, it would effectively eliminate the main source of Salmonella in backyard flocks.  But here’s the problem.  Hatcheries that participate in NPIP inspections are tested for the presence of a few diseases:  These include a few Mycoplasma diseases—bacterial diseases affecting poultry.  Then there are certain strains of avian influenza (low virulence bird flu).  Finally, there are tests for a few of the Salmonellas.  But certainly not all of the bajillion different Salmonellas that chickens can carry and pass on to you.  The other ones are not in the NPIP guidelines and thus they're not tested for.  So how valuable is this recommendation?  Remember the bucket of warm spit?  We’re kinda back to that.

CDC Advice on Poultry Keeping

Now I’m going to say something that I think is really important, so I’m going to bold it and italicize it for emphasis.  Because to me, this is the whole deal:  If we could eliminate Salmonella from backyard flocks, or better yet, ALL flocks, all the CDC recommendations would be moot.  And while testing for and eradicating Salmonella from each backyard flock would be expensive and logistically difficult, testing and eradication at the source—the hatcheries and distributors—would provide a huge running start to eliminating Salmonella.  And the mechanism for doing that, NPIP, is already in place—it just needs to be broader, stronger, and more enforceable.  I suspect that there are hatcheries and distributors out there that are not very keen on this approach and would apply all sorts of political pressure against any legislation that would suggest it.  So it’s a whole lot easier and cheaper for government agencies like CDC to make lists of recommendations.  And if you're the press, publishing articles against chicken kissing probably actually sells copy.  So there you go.

The chief author of the EID publication that set me off on this rant is Dr. Colin Basler, a veterinarian and public health researcher who has done all sorts of good work on a variety of zoonotic diseases.  I sent him an email after I read the article expressing many of the same issues that I brought up in this post.  I haven’t heard back, but it would be nice if I did.  I realize that Dr. Basler doesn’t run the CDC, nor does he have the ability to legislate public health policy.  But it would be nice to have somebody in a position of authority recognize that since backyard flocks are growing in popularity for a variety of reasons, all of them good, that the incidence of poultry associated Salmonellosis will also continue to rise.  And since “education” by issuing lists of mostly impractical suggestions is not a good strategy for solving the problem, maybe it is time to explore better solutions.

Sour Crop and Flystrike: The Little Red Hen Gets Well

Readers:  I'm transitioning my blog to a new platform on Squarespace.  I've updated this blog post and moved it to the new location.  Click here to get there! - Randy

Social Engineering in the Coop – The Arlene Denouement

The more behavioral scientists study domestic chickens the more they come to appreciate their high intelligence and their complex social structure.  Chickens “talk” to each other with a large number of different vocalizations, each with its own meaning.  They show complex thinking in decision making—they take into account prior experience as well as their knowledge about their current situation.  They exhibit self-assessment, and make comparisons between themselves and other chickens in their flock.  They understand the rank of each chicken in the pecking order of their flock, which demonstrates logical reasoning ability. They engage in group activity when they forage and defend themselves.  They demonstrate long-term relationship-building (i.e. friendship) that requires long-term memory.  Author Annie Potts states “It now appears that the cognitive processes involved in representational thinking in chickens are similar to those required for associative learning in humans.”  The fact that chickens think like us is disturbing when you consider how the vast majority of domestic chickens are treated.  But it is also intriguing to think that just as we humans are subjected to subtle social manipulations by Madison Avenue and political campaigns, that chickens, too, can be socially manipulated, because they think like we do. 

What?! Another Sick Hen!

Unfortunately,  I have another sick hen to report today.  Jennifer, the white crested black Polish hen is not eating and lethargic and I’ve just separated her from the flock.  I don’t know if my recent plethora of sick chickens has to do with the incredibly wet summer we’ve had, the fact that many of my hens are getting old, or a combination of things, but since each sick hen seems to have her own distinct illness it isn’t like they’re infecting each other. 

Currently,  Roxie the Red is still recovering from her illness and is occupying the small pen where sick chickens usually stay, and Emily the Silkie is brooding away in the broody coop.  So I’m running out of places to put chickens!  I had to drag my outdoor “chicken gazebo” into the pole barn and have set up a sick room for Jennifer there.

Jennifer’s illness appears to be respiratory – she’s breathing with her beak open as though she can’t get enough air.  I did a throat swab to check for gape worms (more on gape worms later!) and there was no sign of worms, but there was some mucous.  If you’ve ever had pneumonia, you know how it can knock you for a loop.  Now imagine that your infected, congested lungs filled your whole body and you can imagine how Jennifer feels – birds' respiratory systems include not just their lungs but also five air sacs that are spread throughout their entire body cavity, and respiratory infections can involve the whole system.  Jennifer, when she’s healthy, is as crazy and fun as one expects Polish hens to be, and the other hens and I are missing her antics.  We’re all hoping she gets back on her feet soon.  Here’s a small gallery of Jennifer pictures from happier times.

Jennifer

Spending too much time in the rain can do terrible things to a girl's do

Baby Jennifer

"Meet the Flock" Roundup - July & August, 2016

Meet Snowball the Silkie Rooster. This personable little roo has an amazingly long back story for one so young and fluffy. In 2013 I picked three baby chicks out of a batch of straight run fluffy-footed chicks at a local feed store. “Straight run” means that the chicks had not been sexed, so their gender was unknown. “Fluffy-footed” means just that –these chicks would turn into chickens that would have feathers all the way down their legs and on their feet. In my inexperience, I was hoping for three Silkie hens. I’m glad I was not playing the lottery that day, since all three chicks became roosters. Two of them were not even Silkies – early on I figured out that Emile and Paul were roosters (like when they started crowing!), and that they were both bantam Cochins. Snowball was the only Silkie. Sexing baby chicks is difficult – it requires the ability to see minor variations in the baby chicks’ cloacae. It’s so difficult to sex chicks that it is considered as much art as science, and is only done by professionals. Baby Silkies display such minor cloacal differences that it’s pretty much impossible to sex them at all. So you have to wait until they’re approaching maturity before you have any idea if they’re hens or roosters. And Snowball was a late bloomer. We were well into the fall when Snowball got up one day, looked around, and crowed. Unfortunately, since Paul and Emile had declared their roosterhood weeks before Snowball got around to it, crowing was exactly the wrong thing for him to do. Every day from that point on, Snowball’s life became an exercise in escaping the wrath of the other two roosters. Even the hens became hostile to him and soon everybody was picking on him. In due course, he was afraid to leave the roost – even to eat or drink. I started putting him by the water font so he would drink under my protection and I would hold him on my lap and feed him out of my hand. That kept him alive, but his was a pretty pathetic existence. Eventually I built a small 4x4 coop just for him, complete with a sign proclaiming, “SNOWBALL’S SWINGIN’ BACHELOR PAD”. He lived there by himself for about a year. Then, in 2014 I built a second coop which became Snowball’s new home and since then I’ve gradually introduced more chickens to that coop. Today, Coop 2 is home to two Silkie hens, a golden Polish hen, a buff Orpington, and the four teenage Cream Legbars. And Snowball is lord of the manor!

Meet Betty the Easter Egger! Easter Eggers are not a true breed. Rather, they are a cross of a variety of different breeds with Auracanas, a South American breed that lays blue eggs. Auracanas lay blue eggs by adding biliverdin, a hemoglobin byproduct, to their eggshells. Easter Eggers can lay eggs that range from blue to olive green. This sweet hen used to be a regular layer of pretty light-green eggs, but has not laid an egg since last fall. At age three, she’s only middle-aged, but I suspect that Betty may have opted for early retirement!

Meet Bonnie the Cream Legbar pullet! Bonnie is one of the baby chicks I got at the end of March and is unique because she doesn’t have a tail. Poultry people refer to this condition as “rumplessness” and in addition to no tail feathers, rumpless chickens are also lacking a tailbone. There are breeds of rumpless chickens, but Legbars are not one of those breeds, so I don’t know what’s going on with Bonnie. At first I was chalking it up to the Auracana (a rumpless South American breed) genetics in Cream Legbars, but after doing some more reading I now realize that when R.C. Punnett developed the Cream Legbar in the 1930's he didn't use Auracanas per se - the blue egg and the crest genes came from a "yellow-brown colored, crested Chilean hen"—no mention of the hen not having a tail. I’ve exchanged emails with the breeder that Bonnie came from and she is surprised – this has never occurred in her chickens before. I suppose that this must be a spontaneous mutation, which makes Bonnie very special. I expect once she’s a little older she’ll develop super powers.

Here's another picture of Bonnie enjoying a little leaf tidbit in the chicken run.

Meet Buffy the Buff Orpington hen. Buffy is in her fourth year, but maintains her girlish figure and turns out a continuous stream of those lovely brown eggs. She does stop laying eggs on occasion and goes broody. She actually is the only non-Silkie hen in my flock that has bouts of broodiness. I'm hatching a plan (no pun intended, of course!) to put her broodiness to good purpose by using her as the broody hen for next year’s batch of chicks.

Meet Carmen Maranda the cuckoo Marans and Mary the golden Campine. This is not a fabulous picture of either hen, but it’s a great juxtaposition of the largest and smallest hens in the big coop. Carmen, as mild mannered as she is large, lays beautiful chocolate brown eggs and Mary, high-energy and aloof, lays petite white eggs.

Meet Charlie Barred Rock. Charlie is in her fourth year, and just between us, is kind of bossy and verbose. She never stops talking! How can any hen have so much to say? Charlie is the largest of the Barred Rocks and she is without a doubt the alpha hen in the flock, so maybe all that talk is just her reminding the other hens how cool she is.

Meet Courtney the white Silkie hen. If you’ve followed this blog for any time you may feel Courtney needs no introduction, since you no doubt followed the story of Courtney raising the batch of Cream Legbar chicks as their surrogate mom. But Courtney actually has a secret past! Courtney started life in an amazing local bookstore that is not only filled with tons of children’s books, but also a variety of animals for the kids to interact with. Courtney was known as Iggy Peck back then—a perfect name for a chicken living in a bookstore! While Courtney is the smallest chicken in my flock, she makes up for her size with her assertiveness, and apparently that part of her personality manifested itself in her previous life as well. She not only made life miserable for the other chicken in the store, a poor hen-pecked little rooster named Neal, but one fateful day she also pecked a toddler. It was a soft peck and the toddler was not harmed, but Courtney lost her job selling books that day. So then she came to live here at the ranch. The bookstore folks report that since “Iggy Peck” left, Neal has blossomed into a happy, outgoing rooster that loves the attention that all of the kids bestow on him. And Courtney has become a Hipster Hen and a mom! So this is a story with happy ending for everybody!

Edging Away From Cruel Eggs: Part 2—Slogging Toward Enactment

Read "Edging Away from Cruel Eggs: Part 1 - California’s Prop 2"

California’s Propostion 2, “Standards for Confining Farm Animals” passed in 2008, but the fight against it didn’t stop with its passage.  The forces aligned against it included many of the country’s top egg producers and their minions   “Egg producers” refers to the gigantic corporations that sell eggs and egg products.  It is a very misleading term.  I’m very sure that not a single one of the guys who run these companies has personally produced an egg, ever.  Egg production is really the job of the millions of caged chickens in their enormous “production facilities”.  And I don’t suppose that any of those guys resemble the image of the stereotypical farmer either.  They most likely spend their days behind a desk or at a boardroom table, and are about as likely to look like Old MacDonald as a giant chicken confinement building looks like a red mansard-roofed barn with a crowing rooster on top. 

 

Battery Caged Hens (Maqi~commonswiki)

A Bird's Eye View of the Minnesota State Fair

Ah, the Minnesota State Fair—largest state fair in the country by daily attendance, and second only to Texas (which goes on twice as long, don’t you know) in total attendance!  The fair has been a thing since way back in 1854 when it was the Minnesota Territorial Fair, and has happened every year except 1861 and 1862 when both the Civil War and the Dakota War were in progress and again in 1945 and 1946 when we were dealing with World War Two and then a polio outbreak.  Minnesota has had all sorts of other hardships over the years—but except for those few occasions I mentioned, the fair has always gone on, right on schedule.

Fairchild--the Fair Mascot (Jonathunder)

My first Fair experience was in 1969 when I traveled “all the way up to the Cities” to show my prize winning pig.  It both memorable and eye-opening, for me, a teenage farm boy, to find myself in the middle of all the Fair craziness and in the middle of the big city to boot.  But I managed it for three days—sleeping in the FFA dorm at night, taking care of Toody the pig during the day, and otherwise spending a lot of quality time unloading all my summer job cash in the midway and filling up on lots of deep fried cheese curds.  I’ve been going to the fair ever since.  Not every year, mind you, but pretty much.

Last summer was the year that poultry farms across the country were devastated by avian influenza.  Millions of birds succumbed to this highly infectious pathogen.  The fair went on as usual, but there were no birds in the poultry barn—the Minnesota Board of Animal Health had banned all live poultry shows.  All the chicken folks showed up, nevertheless.  Instead of displaying their prize chickens in the Poultry Barn cages, they displayed pictures of their flocks!  Everybody made the best of a bad situation, and the show went on!

This year the chickens are back in all their glory.  Here are a few photos from my 2016 Minnesota State Fair experience.

A typical fair scene--this one is just east of the Grandstands

The Poultry Barn

A very impressive Minorca rooster

A beautiful buff laced bearded Polish hen

The crop art competition is one of my favorites every year.  The entire picture has to be made from plant seeds.  This picture of a hen uses the seeds of green peppers, poppies, brown flax, golden flax, millet, quinoa, red quinoa, amaranth, sesame, and wild rice, as well as lentils, green peas, yellow peas, and cream of wheat.

A detail from a display in the Horticulture Building

This acrylic on canvas painting hanging in the Fine Arts Building is by artist Sharon Anne Dolan and is entitled “Dorothy’s House”.  I like the colorful chickens quite a bit.

Another work from the Fine Arts Building.  This is an iPhone panorama by Janine A. Olmscheid entitled “Blue Ribbon Paper Poultry: 2015 Avian Flu Outbreak” depicting the cages containing pictures of chickens at last year’s fair.  Thus, this is my picture of a picture of some pictures.  Whew!