How common is chicken illness?

Today's discussion comes to us courtesy of a friend who was going to get chickens but then changed her mind. In doing some research she had found countless websites discussing the various illnesses that chickens can get. There are a lot of people out there writing about chickens, and many of us talk about chicken illness and disease. So many in fact that my friend was sure she was going to be battling illness in her flock from day 1! This brought up the question "How often do chickens get sick?"

Thankfully, my chickens don't get sick nearly as often as she seemed to think they would! Is my flock abnormally healthy though? In order to determine the answer to that I turned to a group of chicken owners and asked 6,000 of them a simple question: How long have you had chickens and what illnesses have you dealt with in your flock?


I had an experienced assortment of chicken keepers in my poll group:
12% have had chickens for a year or less. 
39% have raised chickens from 2-4 years.
20% have had chickens more than 5-9 years 
28% having chickens over 10 years. 
A few even clocked in at over 20 years! 

Through their answers we discussed chicken diseases, parasites, injuries, predators and all causes of death. We also discussed bio security with many answers including comments about how weak bio security let illness or parasites into their flocks. Interesting enough, size of flock had more to do with illness incidences than length of time keeping chickens.

How often do chickens get sick?

A full 41% of chicken keepers reported never having never had a problem with illness or disease in their flocks. Never! Now you might think that many of those were the less than 1 year group but obviously the numbers of illness free flocks are much higher than the number of newer flocks in this poll. 

26% have had only 1 incidence of disease in the flocks
19% had 2 incidences
11% had 3 or more incidences 
3% reported chronic or recurrent illness in their flocks.

While recurrent illnesses can be scary, many times it indicates the problem was not cleared up completely, it is being reintroduced through the same source. Often it's simply not something that can be eradicated from the flock. 

Bigger flocks were more likely to have any illness than flocks of less than 10 chickens. This remained true regardless of how long the person had been keeping chickens.

Parasites, while not an illness, are the biggest problem with backyard flocks! Over 30% of all chicken keepers report battling parasites at least once. Yup, you read that right...parasites are more common than disease. This makes perfect sense actually since wildlife often brings the parasites to your flock. 

Predators made a pretty big impact on most flocks with 18% of flock owners having lost chickens to predators. The most frequent reported cause of death in chicken flocks was predators, not illness. 

14% of flocks have experienced some type of injury. Injuries ranged from falls, fights with other chickens and accidents. 


Personally, I have been raising chickens since 2009. I often have around 80 chickens or other poultry in my flock. The poultry diseases I have dealt with are: 1 vent prolapse, 1 impacted crop, a feather follicle infection on a feather footed bird and 1 case of fly strike. 

Non-disease health issues I have handled include: Mites and lice and a few injuries including Frostbite, 1 broken leg, 1 broken beak and a few rooster comb wounds and 1 case of pendulous crop. 

Chick illnesses I've dealt with are: Coccidiosis, pasty butt, cross beak, wry neck, curled toes and spraddle leg in chicks.

I put the chick problems in a separate section because with thousands of chicks hatching yearly I'm bound to have a higher instance of chick problems than the average person hatching a clutch or two a year! 

My experience has been the same as those who answered my poll. The most common cause of chicken death at my farm is predators, wild birds brings lice/mites occasionally and illness and disease is fairly rare considering the amount of chickens I have. I've experienced very few sudden deaths in chickens.

So, why did my friend think all chicken keepers are constantly battling illness in their flocks? Well, my recently formed theory lays the blame on those of us who write about chickens. You see, we talk about every problem we have in our flocks (no matter how small) because we want to put the information out there so it's easy to find when someone needs it. 

We want our solutions to be out there to help other chicken keepers, but when someone is on google, Facebook or even Pinterest looking for chicken info and every other post is about illness...well, it can seem like there's an overwhelming amount of problems in backyard chicken flocks. 

In reality, chickens are pretty healthy. A small flock of chickens can live perfectly happy for years without an incidence of illness. Although there's a 1 in 3 chance they'll get some type of parasite...but those are pretty easy to get rid of. 

Want to know more about chicken health and illnesses? Click here for my other posts on chicken health!

~L

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