Chicken Surgery!

Kris told me not to blog this since she thought an animal rights group might attack but no one reads this blog so here it goes...

Back in September-ish we acquired two little chicks. Jasper named them Alicia and Diego (after the cartoon).

Well it turned out Alicia is a rooster and Diego is a hen so they are now known as Alex and Diega.

Kris, always the animal empathist, noticed that Diega's crop was getting bigger and bigger and hard like a rock. She did some interwebbing and figured out that poor Diega had an impacted crop. After some further interwebbing, it seemed that we were going to either have to pay up to $500 for surgery to unimpact the crop or we were going to have to be the surgeons.

I don't like eggs enough to spend $500 and neither does Kris so we put Jasper to bed, prepared the table and went to work. I had to do the actual cutting but Kris did most of the rest of the work. It was pretty rough at first and I thought Kris wasn't going to make it. Luckily she rebounded and it was me who sat there woozy for the next TWO HOURS while we pulled about a baseball size pile of straw out of her crop tweezer by tweezer.

Ah the life of a gentleman farmer. Fun! No?

Diega is recovering very nicely. The wound and stitches look great (Kris did the stitches). And Kris is a great nurse. Diega is living in our kitchen for now on a diet of yogurt and mushy bread. Hopefully this doesn't happen again or Diega is going to be dinner!