It’s not easy to give antibiotics to a chicken with respiratory disease. I normally have no problem with this with other chickens. I hold her on my lap, wedge her body with one arm, and open her mouth with the same hand. Then I inject medicine with the other hand, gently squeezing the tiny syringe to lay the medicine on her tongue, so that she can swallow it on her own. But with Kiki, it can get almost life-threatening because she struggles so much. Her oxygen supply is already limited to start with, and when she struggles to avoid opening her mouth, she really runs out of breath. So by the time I manage to prop her beak open, and put medicine on her tongue, she tends to inhale it into the wrong place, the lung. She seemed to be suffocating, and making strange sound to clear the fluid out from her system. I thought she was going to die from this. But fortunately she didn’t. She was eating layer pellet from the small feeding box in the corner of the room. It really scared both of us. But I had to give this antibiotic twice a day for a few more days. After going through this twice yesterday, I decided to experiment with a different approach.

In the morning, I let her into the house for a treat, as usual. I snipped off a few small pieces from my English Muffin for breakfast, I injected the Baytril into each piece of the bread just before giving it to Kiki. Guess what? She wolfed all pieces down. Mission accomplished! It worked with her because she still had enough appetite. She even didn’t realize that she was taking medicine. I let her hang out by my desk for a while before I finally let her out. She gave me the look, saying “is that it?” She was wondering why she didn’t have to go through that torture again.