Beware of calcium poisoning in young laying hens
2020-11-30
Calcium poisoning in young laying hens is characterized by atrophy of the kidneys of sick chickens, dilated ureters and stones, and varying degrees of kidney and joint gout.
In acute cases, the feathers are usually fluffy, the crown is small and pale, and the body weight and condition are normal, but he died suddenly in a cage. After autopsy, the whole internal organs can be found to have fine, white, stone dust-like urate deposits. In addition to fluffy feathers and atrophy of crown white, chronic cases also showed symptoms such as anorexia, depression, white feces discharge, and yellow-white feathers around the cloaca.
After an autopsy, white urate crystals were found in the leg joints, wing joints and tendon sheath.
Excessive calcium in the diet is the main cause of calcium poisoning in young laying hens.
In practice, in order to reduce feed costs by individual chicken farmers, young laying hens were supposed to be fed with low-calcium feed in the early stage of breeding, but they were changed to feed during laying period in advance. The result is often only to promote egg production (high protein energy in egg production), but ignore the negative effect of calcium in the diet, which causes the burden on the kidneys of young laying hens to increase, and the calcium excreted with urine is deposited and formed in the ureter. Stones block the ureter and cause acute death of young laying hens. Long-term feeding of high-calcium feed to cause kidney dysfunction is the main cause of chronic death in young laying hens.
In addition, feeding the same feed, the symptoms of poisoning in free-range chickens are usually not obvious. Once transferred to the group and basketed, it often causes a large-scale outbreak of the disease. Therefore, adopting free-range rearing methods to raise young layers can prevent calcium poisoning.
