Gerry seems to be making very good progress with her cold. For a few days we were putting apple cider vinegar in their water, which is supposed to help them feel better. It certainly made them all a bit frisky. I don’t know whether they got a bit drunk, but we’d come home in the evening and there would be a great deal of excited running backwards and forwards as they followed our feet around the edge of the run.
After a couple of days, though, the snot on Gerry’s nose started to get bubbly, which is a sign that it is infected, so we bought some Citricidal. It’s a grapefruit seed extract with seemingly magical properties, killing bacteria without giving them a chance to build up a resistance.
You don’t need much, and humans can use it for a range of complimentary purposes, too. If you want to use it as a mouthwash, you put four drops in a large grass of water. If you want to use it on your hair (the bottle doesn’t say why you would) you do the same. What you don’t do is get it on your skin in its concentrated form. And if you do, you need to wash for 10 minutes to get it off.
There were no actual instructions for how much you should give to an ailing chicken, though, so we topped up their water dispenser to the very top (10 pints) and dripped in seven drops.
Reports from other people who have used it are good, with almost all of them saying it’s cleared up their chucks’ problems in three or four days, so we’ll have to see. I suspect, though, that the coop’s not cold-free yet. Margot had been pecking the bubbly snot off Gerry’s nose, so she’s no doubt destined for the same fate.
And Barbara has started to sneeze.
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