Feed eyed in chicken deaths

MAT-SU — A bad batch of chicken feed has apparently swept through the Valley.

“We’ve contacted Manna Pro and they did pull (the feed) from the shelves at Wal-Mart,” said Nancy Crowden.

She would be the first to admit the evidence isn’t definitive, but it’s pretty close. She and three other people she’s spoken with in the Valley have had chickens get sick and, in some cases, die this fall. Crowden said she lost 12 birds.

All of the people she has spoken to who had chickens die had found the feed in question on sale at Wal-Mart. All of them had their flocks recover once they switched to another brand.

“It’s about the same with everybody; about a week and a half after you switch the food they stop dying and they start to turn around,” she said. Her flock started getting sick Oct. 22 and she switched food the next day.

“Today was the first day they started acting like normal,” she said Friday.

The reason all that evidence is not definitive, Crowden said, is she can’t really get anyone to test the feed for anything besides lead or infectious diseases. The state has already run those tests and they came back negative. But the state doesn’t have the resources or funding to test for anything else.

“Because of funding, he doubts we’ll ever figure out what it is,” she said of the state veterinarian she’s been working with.

But she’s pretty sure there was something in that feed.

“It’s got to be the food, there’s nothing else,” she said. “A lot of us have nothing else in common.”

She said the veterinarian told her the symptoms in her flock were similar to those animals go through after eating rat poison.

But without knowing what the toxin is, Crowden said she’s wary to get rid of the feed for fear that sending it to a landfill would wind up killing ravens. She said the state biologist has pointed out that the landfill is lined so toxins can’t leach out into groundwater and that the garbage is covered up daily. Still, she has her doubts.

“A lot of us have the feed and we’re not sure what to do with it,” she said.

And, without knowing what the toxin was, she’s not sure what to do with her chickens, either.

“We’re afraid to eat our eggs,” she said.

On Facebook, where Crowden has connected with other affected bird-owners, the discussion has gotten somewhat lively. Users are talking about taking up a collection to pay to have some testing done.

The Alaska Hen House and Precious Moments Farm reports being down to 23, hens — which is less than half of its flock. Crowden said she also has a friend who had trouble, and she met another man in the Butte who did as well. She’s sure there’s more, but that the chickens’ owners didn’t figure out what was going on.

“If people only have 10 chickens, they’re really not going to get that concerned about it,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.