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| Hope's spur |
There are many things I never knew about chickens until we acquired hens of our own. The existence of spurs was one of them.
A chicken’s spur is aptly named. It’s a pointed growth that usually extends at a right angle from the back of the leg, sometimes with a slight bend upward. They’re more common in roosters than in hens, but hens can develop them as well.
“Most hens have little rudimentary knobs instead of spurs, although some have real spurs that can grow quite long,” Gail Damerow writes in The Chicken Encyclopedia. Quite long indeed.
The photo above shows the left leg of Hope, a Rhode Island Red and one of our three hens. The horizontal projection at the lower right is her back toe. The growth above that is a spur which, as you can see, curves up and forward. The photo is a bit misleading because the tip of the spur is not as close to the leg as it appears to be here, and the tip actually seems to be a bit to the right of the leg. Still, the spur is long, and we fear it could eventually damage or even puncture the leg, because of this basic fact about spurs: they keep growing.
We don’t have roosters, and Hope is the only hen we’ve owned who has developed a spur, so we have no prior experience with them. As the spur continued to develop, we decided it was time to intervene. But what to do? Remove it? Trim it? We’ve had to cut our hens’ toenails several times over the years, but this seemed more . . . daunting. A spur is large. It's thick. And it's full of blood. Caution is called for.
There aren’t very many veterinarians in Maine who treat chickens. I found one 20 miles away who agreed to take a look at Hope, possibly with the goal of removing the spur, but she admitted by e-mail that she doesn’t have a lot of experience working with chickens.
As we weighed the possibility of hitting the interstate with Hope on board, a bit of online research revealed that it’s possible to file a spur, at least enough to blunt the tip. So yesterday, we decided to give that a go. While I held Hope, Liz began scraping away with a newly purchased six-inch Stanley file. Hope squawked, but from aggravation, not pain. Liz didn’t get down to the quick, so there was no bleeding. And the tip of the spur is now a bit more blunt than it was before. "It's hard, very hard," Liz said of the spur, "more like a horn than a nail."
We’ll follow up with more filing in the days ahead, and we haven’t ruled out taking Hope to the vet if necessary. But we’re hoping this may shorten and flatten the spur enough to get the job done without a stressful and unpleasant road trip whose outcome would be uncertain. All of which leaves me wondering what surprises "the girls" will spring on us next.
A chicken’s spur is aptly named. It’s a pointed growth that usually extends at a right angle from the back of the leg, sometimes with a slight bend upward. They’re more common in roosters than in hens, but hens can develop them as well.
“Most hens have little rudimentary knobs instead of spurs, although some have real spurs that can grow quite long,” Gail Damerow writes in The Chicken Encyclopedia. Quite long indeed.
The photo above shows the left leg of Hope, a Rhode Island Red and one of our three hens. The horizontal projection at the lower right is her back toe. The growth above that is a spur which, as you can see, curves up and forward. The photo is a bit misleading because the tip of the spur is not as close to the leg as it appears to be here, and the tip actually seems to be a bit to the right of the leg. Still, the spur is long, and we fear it could eventually damage or even puncture the leg, because of this basic fact about spurs: they keep growing.
We don’t have roosters, and Hope is the only hen we’ve owned who has developed a spur, so we have no prior experience with them. As the spur continued to develop, we decided it was time to intervene. But what to do? Remove it? Trim it? We’ve had to cut our hens’ toenails several times over the years, but this seemed more . . . daunting. A spur is large. It's thick. And it's full of blood. Caution is called for.
There aren’t very many veterinarians in Maine who treat chickens. I found one 20 miles away who agreed to take a look at Hope, possibly with the goal of removing the spur, but she admitted by e-mail that she doesn’t have a lot of experience working with chickens.
As we weighed the possibility of hitting the interstate with Hope on board, a bit of online research revealed that it’s possible to file a spur, at least enough to blunt the tip. So yesterday, we decided to give that a go. While I held Hope, Liz began scraping away with a newly purchased six-inch Stanley file. Hope squawked, but from aggravation, not pain. Liz didn’t get down to the quick, so there was no bleeding. And the tip of the spur is now a bit more blunt than it was before. "It's hard, very hard," Liz said of the spur, "more like a horn than a nail."
We’ll follow up with more filing in the days ahead, and we haven’t ruled out taking Hope to the vet if necessary. But we’re hoping this may shorten and flatten the spur enough to get the job done without a stressful and unpleasant road trip whose outcome would be uncertain. All of which leaves me wondering what surprises "the girls" will spring on us next.
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