# stop laying



## laxbro (Jul 4, 2012)

i have a 1 1/2 year old buff orpington who has stopped laying. she used to be one of the best layers, but now we get 1 or 2 eggs a week from her. and she sits in the nesting box all day and doesn't lay. is something wrong with her.


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## Bee (Jun 20, 2013)

Typical of this breed and at that age. Her fat layers are interfering with how well she can lay an egg and the large eggs she lays may have caused her oviduct to prolapse...if she is sitting on that nest, could be she is having trouble having an egg. She could be prolapsed and unable to get that egg out.

You can put on a latex medical glove and gently insert a finger into her vent and palpate if she has an egg in her oviduct, through the intestinal wall. Some people will soak a bird in warm water to try and help when a bird is egg bound and sometimes it works. Sometimes they lube up the vent, but that's not the problem, so not sure how effective that is.

The long and the short of it is this...the hen needs culled anyway due to her laying issues and how much pain it could be causing her. Even if you get the egg out this time, there will be other times as she goes along and each time she tries to lay past all these obstructions it's a painful process.

If you don't get the egg out, she is likely to suffer and then die. If you do cull her, please take the time to explore her insides and see for yourself the difficulty caused by the excessive fat and large eggs in this breed. If she dies on her own, I urge you to also do a necropsy and take a look at what you see in there, please take a few pics so that others can learn as well.

I did a processing demonstration this summer and someone brought BOs about the same age as yours. By the time we got to them it was afternoon but one of them had a huge egg still in her oviduct when we processed. Both had prolapsed oviducts. Both had massive layers of fat around the vent and all internal organs...so much so that you could not SEE the organs until you dug into the fat to find them.

Here's a diagram of the internal organs of a chicken and see if you can imagine why huge fat layers could obstruct normal delivery of an egg...then imagine the eggs are so big they have moved the oviduct even lower in the abdominal cavity than it normally lies.

They have spaced out these organs in this pic so they are easily visualized, but there is normally not this much spacing between the organs.


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