Amazingly enough, the scalped pullet has lived for a week past her attack. She looks like hell, but she’s not dead.
She is entirely missing the skin and muscle from the top of her head down to where her neck joins her body. I don’t know how it’s possible that a creature can survive without so much skin, but she is. Each night I squirt her with Bactine spray and coat her entire wound in Neosporin. The first two days were horrible. After disinfecting my hands I packed the cream into the cavity between her remaining neck skin and muscle just like you would stuff herb butter into a chicken you were preparing to roast. For a few days last week I thought her left ear would peel off because it was just sort of flapping in the breeze. I could feel the terrible pain she was in and often doubted my decision to try to save her.
But, she’s eating and drinking and doing chickeny things with her brothers, and her wing and back wounds, which didn’t involve skin loss, have scabbed over and healed. So we’re taking it one day at a time and I’m remaining vigilant for any signs of infection.
Oh, and I have named this little girl Cora, after the heroine in The Last of the Mohicans, a story not short on scalpings.
[...] its ease. It was a bit shocking to me how easily the head came away from the body, especially after having worked so hard to keep a head attached to one of my own birds. Then Joel cut off the feet and the oil gland above the [...]