Some good news for Parsnip! - Writing Wednesday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
I thought that since I brought you on this ridiculously dramatic Parsnip journey that it would only be fair to give you a positive update of how things are going. Good news, Parsnip is back to laying again! She is back to being the bossy-boots that we all know and love and that makes us all incredibly happy.☺
It was getting to the point where it was all a bit depressing. 😂 First, she hurt her right foot with the blue tag on it. We'd noticed some swelling at the top of her foot and we saw that she was quite visibly limping around so we kind of concluded that she must have jumped off the gate like she always does, and bashed her foot on the way down. We gave her some salt and vinegar hot baths and disinfected her foot with some rubbing alcohol. We'd also isolated her from the other chickens so that she wouldn't get pushed around whilst she was recovering. She was still laying then and after a few days we could see that she was getting better so we didn't worry. At one point, she escaped from her isolation and ran straight to the main pen so we thought she wanted to go back in and we let her do that. 😂 We were all quite happy because she seemed to be getting back to her normal self and although she was still limping, she still managed to make her way up the ladder to lay.
However, then we saw another gradual decline in her health when she started hunching over constantly and began looking a bit forlorn, a bit like this 😐😑. We gave her more time to recover but then PANIC, she stopped laying. We thought that this was because her foot was still not fully healed so we decided to resume the treatment that we did before. We put her in salt and vinegar baths and disinfected her foot but after a while, it seemed like there was actually nothing wrong with her foot because we hadn't noticed anything that different from before. My sister does French lessons with this 3 year-old girl and her mother has a farm so we decided to talk to her because Parsnip was still not laying and there was nothing wrong with her foot. She said that she might be egg bound which apparently can kill a chicken in 48 hours!
We PANICKED again and put her in some Epsom salt baths because apparently that can get a chicken to lay again. However, we were soon thwarted again when we found that she began to limp on her once healthy left leg. After some closer looking, we found a lump on the top of her left leg and by that point, we all pretty much thought that there was nothing more that we could do. We tried to wrap her leg in a bandage to support it but she kept on moving and shrieking in pain, every time we tried to touch it. Our holiday was coming up and we pretty much knew that when we came back, we would have to kill Parsnip because we didn't want her to be in any more pain.
However, we were lucky. Around 5 days into our holiday, my mum got a message from her friend who was looking after our chickens, that she thought that Parsnip was laying. I didn't believe it at first because I saw her go into the pen a few times but we still ended up with two eggs by the end of the day. But when we returned home on Friday, my sister looked into the egg box and was surprised to find three eggs!
Although I've always been an animal person, I'd never expected to feel that sentimental towards an animal. I thought that I could quite easily watch a farm animal die if I had to. However, I think that because I began to look after my own chickens, I actually found it a lot more difficult now to say that this chicken should die. I guess it just proves where your food comes from and how dedicated you have to be when you look after farm animals because I don't think that any farmer really likes to see their animals sick, when they've worked hard to bring them up. Obviously, if Parsnip was not better when we'd got back from holiday, we would have taken the easy decision to just kill her because we wouldn't have wanted her to live in more pain. However, this process has allowed us to get an idea of what looking after farm animals is really like and it was quit eye-opening to see. Let's hope that Parsnip doesn't injure herself again! 😂 She's still got a way to go before she is fully better but let's keep our fingers crossed.
Do you have chickens or pets? Have they ever been seriously injured? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you!
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See you next time,
Bye,
XOX, Juliette
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