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My chicken is purple

I don’t know if the Ivermectin is helping Albert or not, but I noticed a couple of days ago that the bald spot was bleeding. Chickens will do that. Even though he’s a strapping big brute, it’s not out of the ordinary for a fellow chicken to sneak up behind him and have an experimental peck on an odd patch of skin.

And once blood is drawn…chickens are absolute piranha with a bleeding chicken. That’s when chicken keepers pull out what we call ‘purple anti-pecking spray’. I bet you’ve guessed what that is already.

Gentian violet.

It acts as a disinfectant and the purple color isn’t nearly as attractive to chickens. Holy hell it goes everywhere, though. And, of course, indelibly stains anything it touches.

When I was a kid, it was seen as a last-ditch treatment for poison ivy. My brother, who was terribly terribly allergic, spent most of his Summers with purple legs.

When my mother was in nursing school, one of the med students was getting married. They chased him down, stripped him and barber-striped his penis. (His fellow male med students, not the nurses).

If that story is apocryphal and every med student knows it, please don’t tell me. I like it too much.

Oh. Right. Purple chicken. Sorry for focus. Albert is never still.

August 19, 2021 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 13