Killer in the Shadows. How My Flock and I Learned to Deal With Marek's Disease

There are few words in the world of keeping chickens that strikes fear into our hearts more than the two words, Marek's Disease. It seems that with surprising frequency the topic will pop up on Back Yard Chickens. Sometimes the poster has already gotten the diagnosis through a necropsy of a bird in their flock that has died under mysterious circumstances. Others are looking for answers. They are losing birds at a surprising rate. Birds are sick. Birds are dead. Birds have lost the use of one or both legs. Birds are actively dying (a term I picked up during my career as a nurse meaning that death is imminent but hasn't occurred yet) and they are struggling to find out why. All are begging for help.

I don't know how many times I read these posts back when I first joined the forum and thought to myself, 'poor soul, I sure hope that never happens to me or my flock'.

Then it did.

First off I want to say, I am not a doctor of veterinary medicine. I am not a specialist in avian medicine or research. I am not here to offer diagnoses or medical advice. I am at this time, a 67 year old retired nurse who has been keeping chickens for almost 6 years. My name is Becky, and I have Marek's Disease in my flock.

This article is about my experiences and observations down through the years as I struggled to find out what was killing my birds and having found out, learned to deal with what has to be one of the most dreaded and hated diseases that you can encounter if you keep chickens. Hopefully what I have been through will help readers and maybe even make you smile a time or two in spite of the grimness of the subject.

I bought my first flock as a compromise after retiring to a 30 acre hobby farm along with my wonderful husband, (whom I am trying to drive crazy one chicken at a time), along with our dogs and cats. I wanted a horse and a few goats but I had developed what we recently learned was serum negative Rheumatoid Arthritis along with degenerative disc disease in my spine along with moderate osteoporosis, arthritis and osteopenia so the physical demands of taking care of such animals was out of the question. Then it dawned on me. Chickens! I'm gonna get me some chickens! I can take care of me some chickens!

Like most prospective chicken parents I hung around BYC, joined the forum, did my research and decided that I would get my birds from a private breeder who bred birds for disease resistance. I was aware of Marek's Disease when I bought my darling little fuzzy butts home and plopped them in my brooder but had been assured that there would be no problem and for the longest time there wasn't.

My birds thrived, grew, began to lay, then shortly after their first birthday I noticed that one of my roosters wasn't acting right. First off, I love roosters. Hens are sweet and funny birds but in my humble opinion Roosters Rule. I've always had a soft spot for them with their attitudes and flamboyant struts and crows so to find my sweet Buff Orpinton flock master, Big Red, losing weight and acting withdrawn, I went into panic mode faster than a new mother with a fussy baby that has a runny nose. Red's symptoms were weird. Weight loss, diarrhea, extreme thirst and a wilted, white comb and wattles. His water craving became so pronounced that he would run up to me and drink from the garden hose as I filled their water bowl. He would gobble food, yet kept losing weight. I spent hours on BYC looking for clues and even more hours on the internet typing in symptoms and reading anything I could about diseases in chickens. Nothing added up and nothing lead me to believe that Marek's Disease was the culprit behind Red's illness.

I did everything I could think of. I wormed him, I poured every antibiotic I had on hand into him. He continued to weaken until two weeks later, he died.

At that point in time, I was saddened but not overly concerned. Chickens like to die. They are low on the food chain meaning that they will hide the fact that they are ill until they have one clawed foot in the grave you have dug for them beforehand and the other on a banana peel. Then it is usually too late to help them and they will go belly up in record time.

Early in our Hobby Farm career, my husband and I decided to try our hand at raising sheep. We knew absolutely nothing about them, but an Amish neighbor was willing to give us six bred ewes in exchange for being able to graze his flock in our pasture. It sounded like a good 'farm business' for our upcoming retirement so we decided to take a crash course in keeping sheep.

One day while talking to a friend of ours who raised and showed the animals, we mentioned that we were giving keeping a flock of sheep a try and did they have any advice for us? “Yes, they said seriously. “Dig a hole. Sheep LOVE to die”. He was being serious and it didn't take us long to find out what he was talking about. Our sheep did love to die and ours did so at an alarming rate until we decided that keeping sheep wasn't for us. Well, chickens love to die faster and more frequently than our sheep did, at least my chickens seemed to.

I began to notice that chicks hatched under my broodies were developing some really odd neurological problems. Three month old birds were developing seizures. Some would suddenly jump straight up in the air, scream, come down landing on their sides and spin around on their shoulders like Curly in an old 3 Stooges film. Some would walk in circles. Endless tight circles. Some would have frank seizures as if they had epilepsy. All would waste away to skin and bones, refuse to eat and decline to the point that I would either find them dead under the roost bars or be forced to put them down to end their suffering.


Still I didn't know what was happening to them.

Then something new popped up. One of my best brood hens developed what I called 'a funky eye'. I had seen her quarrel with another hen and figured that she had been pecked. I hadn't read anything about ocular Marek's disease at this point in time but the eye didn't change. Her pupil was what we call 'pin point' and her iris had dulled from a normal brick brown to a strange green color. But by this time I was losing birds at an alarming rate. Broodies were hatching chicks for me but once they reached maturity they started getting sick and dying. Usually when they reached sexual maturity and 9 out of 10 were my much loved roosters. Then hens were doing pretty well, but the poor boys were dropping like flies.

One of the most distasteful parts of keeping chickens is putting on your big girl panties and having to deal with euthanizing a bird that is suffering. I hated it and still do to this day. I am not a stranger to death. I was a practicing nurse for almost 40 years when I retired and before going to work with my husband as his office manager and nurse I worked in geriatric and rehabilitative nursing. I've done CPR, I've held hands while last breaths have been taken, I've made difficult calls to families to inform them that their loved one had just passed. I buried both of my parents. But having to kill a beloved bird that had become a pet was just about more than I could handle. It's much different when death is being meted out by your own hand even if it is what many consider to be livestock. I shed more tears than I could count, sitting on a bench in my run, cradling a sick rooster and on rare occasions, a hen, in my lap, petting them, telling them how much they were loved and thanking them for the good job they did guarding the girls or laying eggs before taking them out of sight of the rest of the flock and ending their suffering. I got to the point where I became an expert on how to humanely dispatch a chicken. But there were times that I just couldn't do it and had to call upon my poor husband to do the task for me.

I was rapidly losing ground with my flock. By their second birthday, all of my original roosters were dead. I was seeing losses of second generation hens along with 1 year old cockerels/roosters. 2 years of age seemed to be the magic number. Nobody was surviving past that birthday except for hens from my original flock. I became desperate. Two more birds had developed 'funky eye'. Roosters were dying not long after their male hormones kicked in. I started asking questions on the forum and somebody asked me if I had considered Marek's disease. I had but the symptoms hadn't added up and I still hadn't done any reading about ocular Marek's....yet. I thought I had bigger fish to fry.

We live in the middle of an Amish community and do business with some of the farmers who have side businesses on their farms. One day while waiting for my husband to return to our car, I set watching their free range chickens scratching around, acting like happy birds. They looked healthy, fat and sassy, and when my husband got back in the car I pointed that fact out to him. No stranger to my problems, and sympathetic to my losses, he suggested that maybe I should consider getting some eggs from them to hatch in the Brinsea incubator he had bought me for Christmas. After some consideration, I did, and soon I had 11 barnyard God only knows what they are Amish chicks scratching around happily in my brooder. 10 cockerels and 1 lone pullet. I looked at the boys as they matured and sighed, sure that they too would drop over before they were a year old. Still, I got and hatched more eggs.

While these birds prospered, my purebreds continued to have problems. They were dying at an alarming rate. Sometimes two a week but usually I could count on at least one bird a week dying or being put down. My original flock of over 30 birds was down considerably and still they kept dying.

I had to do something.

We are very lucky to have an excellent Veterinary College in Columbia Missouri at the University of Missouri. Somebody on BYC suggested I have a necropsy done on one my dead birds and after looking on line I decided to call the lab there and ask them questions. I was privileged to connect with a very nice doctor there who was the head of their Veterinary Laboratory and he was more than willing to talk to me. I told him about my problems, my birds' symptoms and would he be willing to do a necropsy for me. He was very willing but said. I hate to say this but even without a necropsy I'd just about guarantee that you have Marek's disease in your flock.

Time stood still. He continued to tell me about the prevalence of Marek's disease in American flocks (It's everywhere) and then told me that the bad news was that I was going to have a lot of birds die but the good news was, they wouldn't all die. I asked him if I should cull the whole flock and start over with vaccinated birds and he said no. Birds that survived would be worth their weight in gold. They would be truly resistant. The trick was to get them to survive for 3-4 years if not longer. But send him a bird if I wanted and he would confirm what we both suspected.

I thanked him, got off the phone, and burst into tears. My worst suspicions had proven to be true. But something popped into my mind at that point. Somewhere during that conversation with that doctor I had mentioned about the eye problems with three of my hens and one of my roosters. I'd finally read about ocular Marek's shortly before calling the College and Suddenly I connected it with his suspicions about Marek's disease. I think I had been in denial up till then about the connection of the gray eye in my birds and reality had given me a loud wake up call. But with that wake up call, I had a plan.

My husband is a retired eye doctor. For 7 years we had worked together in his practice. I call it my dream job as a nurse. Like humans, chickens have eyes. DUH! I pulled myself together, went inside and the first thing he asked me was if I had made any progress. I told him what I had been told and then asked him if a herpes infection in a chicken's eyes would present the same as it would in a humans' eyes. By this time I had been doing a LOT of reading. Not just forum stuff but some pretty serious research papers on all sorts of diseases including Marek's Disease and one of the first things I'd learned about Marek's is that it is basically a systemic herpes infection in chickens. Only unlike humans, it presents differently causing tumors, neurological problems (scissor paralysis-seizures) and ocular changes also known as gray eye. Birds can survive the primary infection of the disease which happens about the time the birds are 9 weeks old only to die of tumors or failure to thrive and infections due to weakened immune systems at a later date. My husband assured me that it would, herpes was herpes after all and eyes are eyes, so I asked him if he would look at a couple of my birds' eyes and tell me if it was a herpes infection. He agreed and dug out his hand held microscope.

My girls were wonderful patients, better than some little kids and they set patiently in my arms while my husband focused the bio microscope into first one eye and then the other. 'It's herpes'. He told me. “And it's bad”.

Herpes infections in the eyes are extremely painful for a human. He told me that they were equally painful for the chickens and along with the pain, they were losing their sight. One was almost blind but was coping well with life. I had my diagnosis. My flock had Marek's Disease.

I have to admit that I went a bit numb at that point. Spring waxed and waned into Summer. Birds from my original flock and their offspring got sick and died, I dug little graves all over the yard until I ran out of places and had to start digging graves in our timber. My original flock of birds was painfully diminished but something was happening with the Amish barnyard cross birds. They were thriving. I had lost one to scissor paralysis at the age of 9 weeks and one to suspected coccidia but one summer's evening my husband found me standing outside the run staring at the birds. By this time he was used to what was going on and unfortunately so was I. Joining me, watching me watching the birds, he asked 'What's wrong? Is one on it's way out?”

I shook my head. “No, I said. They aren't dying. Why aren't they dying?” My ever patient husband looked at the too many to count young birds happily scratching around in the run and shook his head. “You sure have a lot of birds.” he observed. 'And they look healthy'. The 'they' he was referring to was the Amish stock which had been breeding like rabbits for me. I had separated them from the original flock of birds after talking to the MIZZOU vet (even though the Genie was well out of the bottle) and had put them in their own coop. Like in the book of Genesis, they had gone forth and multiplied and they were fruitful! Boy were they fruitful. I had let them brood eggs and hatch whatever and whenever they wanted, thinking that in order to wind up with enough surviving birds to keep us and our friends in fresh eggs I was going to have to have a steady supply of birds to replace the ones that would surely be kicking the bucket. Only they didn't.

I had close to 60 birds at that time. Surviving birds from the original flock and the rest in these barnyard crosses that I knew had game bird in them along with Cochin and Lord only knows what else. They were nice birds. The roosters were friendly to humans but loved a good fight thanks to their game bird genes and the hens were good layers. But best of all, they appeared to be Marek's resistant.

Suddenly things began to make sense to me. My original flock, bred for resistance were resistant but they weren't resistant to the strain of Marek's Disease that we have in our area. On the other hand the birds that were hatched from Amish stock in our neighborhood, had been around enough that they had developed true resistance to this nasty strain. The strange thing was that while my resistant hens from my original flock were hatching chicks that should have been resistant the same as they were, they weren't. The pullets were dying the same as the cockerels were. To this day this remains a mystery to me, although I do have my suspicions as to why this happened.

Learning about Marek's Disease and it's intricacies is an ongoing education. I started doing more reading and discovered that there are breeds of birds that have natural genetic resistance to Marek's Disease. There was also the big debate about vaccinating, pro and con. I had experienced a broody hatch that had one surviving chick that the hen rejected and was desperate for a couple of babies to put in the brooder with it. The local farm store had two bantam chicks left and when questioned, they assured me that they were vaccinated for Marek's Disease. I brought them home and put them with my baby, not expecting them to survive past maturity. The strain of Marek's I was dealing with was a particularly lethal one so I had my doubts. They didn't die. In fact, those two little Old English Game Bird Black Breasted Red hens are now three plus year old hens and going strong. Does this make a point that vaccinating against Marek's disease works? I have read and read and read studies and posts concerning the pro's and con's of vaccinating for Marek's disease and I can see both sides of the argument clearly. What I am observing, is that in my particular instance, Marek's vaccine appear to be offering some protection to new chickens introduced to my flock.

Recently I decided to add Egyptian Fayoumi birds to the group. These birds are amazing in that they're naturally resistant to Marek's and other avian diseases to the point that universities are doing studies concerning their robust immune systems. I was hoping to cross breed them to my Amish barnyard birds to increase their resistance. I also made the painful decision to cull the last of my original flock.

It was hard.

The girls were getting older and like most birds that are Marek's carriers, their egg production had fallen off early. All they wanted to do was sit in the coop on the roost bars, spreading dander laced with Marek's Disease with every flap of their wings. Friend's butchered them for the freezer for me and they went towards dog food. I hated to do it but while they were resistant, they were still carriers and at that point in time I didn't want to expose my other healthy birds any more than they had already been exposed to. Their offspring were not resistant so using them for brood was out of the question.

The only Amish birds I lost to what I suspected was Marek's, besides the one chick that died of paralysis, were birds that were brooded under a hen that was a carrier and one rooster who expired of unknown causes when he was 2 years of age. I have one surviving rooster from a clutch of 4 eggs raised under a Marek's broody hen. He is 4 years old now, almost 5, and has earned the right to rule the roost bars and be crowned with the name of Old Man. I have two of his sons and hope to eventually breed them with my Fayoumi hens when I can increase my hen population to a more comfortable number.

So many times I am contacted on BYC and asked questions concerning my experiences with Marek's Disease and what would I suggest. As stated, I cannot give medical advice. I am not a Veterinarian or Home Extension specialist. I am just a struggling flock keeper who has held more than her share of dying pet birds in her lap thanks to the ravages of Marek's Disease. I speak from experience and knowledge that I have gathered studying the subject on the internet. What has worked for me may not necessarily work for you but when it comes to dealing with Marek's, anything is worth a try. In fact, I highly recommend that people do research about Marek's Disease BEFORE bringing chicks or birds onto your property or adding them to your flock.

There is a wealth of information out there from the light reading to the scientifically complex and it depends on just how deep you want to go in your quest for knowledge. Check out threads concerning Marek's Disease here on Back Yard Chickens and particularly read Nambroth's excellent The Great Big Giant Marek's Disease FAQ article here on the forum which I consider to be the bible of keeping chickens with Marek's Disease in your flock. I will, though, try to cover a few questions that I have been asked here.

1) Should I kill my birds and start over?

Why throw out the baby with the bath water? First off if you suspect, even have an inkling that you have a problem with Marek's in your flock, you should close your flock until you find out what is going on. No birds in No birds out. Now this is where it gets touchy. Marek's Disease is transferred via dander that your chickens shed in an alarming amount their whole lives. Anybody who has kept birds knows this all too well the amount of dander that even a cute tiny fluff ball chick can produce. Marek's Disease is airborne as well as well as being transmitted vial bodily fluids and in one study I read I learned that it can travel 5 miles on the wind. That is why the disease is EVERYWHERE. I was stunned to learn that if every flock in America was tested it would show that they had been exposed to Marek's. The key is in individual bird's resistance to the disease. One day I set at my computer and found myself staring out into space. Suddenly I had realized the implications of air transmission of Marek's Disease. Imagine your coop as ground zero. Put a compass on your coop using it as a base and make a circle around it representing 5 miles. Dander from your birds is traveling that distance in every direction within that circle. So dander from your birds has reached a flock that is at the edge of that 5 mile perimeter. Now those birds are exposed and carriers even if they have been vaccinated. Those birds take a dust bath and as chickens will do, they shake out their feathers emitting a cloud of dust and dander which the wind picks up and begins to spread in a 5 mile radius around that coop. Are you beginning to see the really BIG picture here? No wonder 'it' is everywhere. You can't stop it from spreading. It's even in wild bird dander. Can you keep wild birds off your property? If there was such a thing as a bubble that you could put over your house and yard including your coop you might have a chance of keeping birds out of your run and coop but I've discovered that when they are tempted with the prospect of a free meal, those little devils are quite determined to get to it and will find a way inside run or coop. So if you want birds for eggs and your enjoyment, no, don't cull your whole flock unless you have birds that are showing active symptoms of Marek's disease and declining. Sick birds shed more dander and with the dander they are shedding more Marek's disease. Yes, you are going to have birds die but they all won't die. Some will survive. Then you can decide what you want to do in the future. But every chicken existing in a 5 mile radius around your coop has been exposed. Possibly my chickens were exposed to dander from a bird in another coop somewhere within the perimeter of some other coop in that 5 mile radius. I'll never know. I practiced good bio security. Not great but good. It's a hobby farm and well, dirt and germs happen. But to this day I do not know where my infection came from. Marek's disease they say, stays on property and in the dirt for 7 years. We had lived on our farm slightly over 7 years when I got my original flock. It came from somewhere and like I was told by a conservation officer, the Amish around us aren't great at practicing bio security. If a turkey dies on their property, they don't burn or bury the carcass. It gets thrown in a ditch where wildlife feed on it and carry whatever it died from to the wild turkey population and other flocks around the area. Suddenly wild turkeys along with farm flocks are dying from whatever Amish Farmer Amos' bird died from. And if you keep turkeys, so are yours. As it goes with turkeys, so it goes with chickens, cows, hogs, horses.... As the old song goes. 'Ob La Di Ob La Da Life Goes On'.

2) Will it help if I sanitize my coop?

Well, it won't hurt. It's a good idea to keep your coop as clean as possible and there are many commercial products available that will kill bacteria and viruses. Oxine is one of the few that is recorded to kill Marek's virus. But from my experience with chickens, one of the first things I've learned about them besides that they love to die, is that they are dirty by nature. I mean come on guys. You give them fresh water daily and instead of drinking it, they go out in their run and drink poop laced water from the nearest puddle. What I'm saying is you can sanitize, it won't hurt but keeping a coop bacteria and virus free is more work than most of us can reasonably put into our flocks. Within the last ten years or so with the Avian Influenza outbreak in America, it was proven that even the most stringent safety measures couldn't stop the spread of that virus and I don't think any of us are into a plan that includes euthanizing all of your birds. The truth is, you cannot remove Marek's contaminated dander from your property. One study I read said, yes you could if you were willing to scrape X amount of dirt from every inch of your property, discard it in a safe manner, then sanitize every outbuilding, your home, your car (no wait, can't do that. The minute you drive it off your property to town, you have probably rolled the tires through contaminated dirt or road) your trees, your bushes and flowers....well you get the idea and then, oh DARN! A contaminated sparrow just flew through my yard. Gotta start over, now where did I put that shovel and 5,000,000 buckets of sanitizer?


3) Should I vaccinate my birds?

This is a personal decision and for many open to debate. I myself do not bring any birds into my flock that have not been vaccinated. It's a plan that so far is working for me but the final decision is up to you. Vaccinating does not stop the bird from carrying the virus. It stops the formation of tumors that is the hallmark of Marek's Disease and keeps birds from dying from that end result.

4) Can I sell birds or chicks from my exposed/carrier flock?

If you are a conscientious and responsible flock keeper, no. But, you are undoubtedly thinking, if it's EVERYWHERE, where's the harm? Truth is that there are different strains of Marek's Disease and the strain you are dealing with may very well be different than the one that the buyer has around him or her. Check with your local Extension Office's poultry expert. They will know what strains are in your state/area and the prevalence of that strain. In all truthfulness, if you are dealing with what I have been dealing with, no way you would want to inflict it on another flock owner.

5) Can I hatch chicks from my flock if my parent birds are vaccinated but I have un-vaccinated carrier birds in my flock?

Sure, it's worth a try. To this day I do not know why my second generation birds did not inherit some of the resistance that kept the surviving hens alive. Writings say that resistance is passed down from the hen but that didn't seem to be the case in my birds. Chicks hatched from vaccinated bantams and Egyptian Fayoumis in my flock are into their second and third year and showing no signs or symptoms of the disease so far. If you are thinking of hatching chicks from carrier birds, what I was told by the Laboratory DVM at MIZZOU was that what I wanted to look for was birds that had survived longer than 3 years. 4 years even better I had hens that made it that almost that long but my problem may have been that all of my roosters were under 2 years old when they succumbed. Did that play a part of the second generations susceptibility? Once again, although I do suspect that it was a factor, I do not know for certain. The problem with waiting to see how many birds survive past 3-4 years is whether or not you will have fertile hens and roosters at that age that are capable of reproducing. One of my later questions that I pondered was even if you are lucky enough to have a four year old hen that is still fertile and a four year old rooster who can still get the job done, what is to keep the hatchling from inhaling a lethal dose of concentrated dander from mom without succumbing due to sheer mass of exposure? The very definition of resistance means that the parent bird that has been exposed to a disease and survived. Plus, resistance does not mean immunity. A resistant bird has a chance of surviving exposure or infection due to a robust immune system or genetic resistance that has been passed down from the parent bird. An immune bird will not get sick in the first place.

It gets convoluted doesn't it?

What is recommended is that you try to keep newly hatched chicks as far away from carrier birds as you can and as long as you can so their little bodies have a chance to develop an immune system that has even a slight chance of surviving exposure to disease. Then you wait. No guarantees are available when you are dealing with Marek's Disease. Only uncertainties. When all is said and done, once you have established that you have Marek's in your flock, keeping back yard chickens and keeping them alive becomes one big experiment.

What does the future hold for the flock that has Marek's Disease in it?

I wish I knew. Personally, I do know that I am no longer afraid of Marek's disease. It's in my flock and that is a given and I can't change that fact. Nor am I about to give up. Blessedly, the purge from the initial battle is over-at least I hope it is for the time being. Last year I lost only two birds. One died from a mating injury and had to be culled due to her back being broken. The other was unknown causes although she showed no symptoms of Marek's Disease.

A year earlier, I had lost a hen under the same circumstances, no symptoms, just dead one morning without warning. I decided to cut her open, expecting to find tumors in her related to Marek's so imagine my surprise when instead I discovered that she had expired from an undetected reproductive infection. One article I read said that once you have established that you have Marek's in your flock, every time you lose a bird, just say it was due to Marek's and leave it at that.

But for the first time, I had lost a bird to a disease process besides parasites and Marek's. As sad as I was over losing a good laying hen and broody that had never caused a moment's trouble in my flock, I was almost giddy with happiness over what had killed her.

If I had any advice to put out there, it would be, Take a look around your neighborhood. Are there any other people around you that are keeping chickens. Talk to them. Ask them if they have lost birds and be honest with them that you either think you have or have verified that you have Marek's Disease in your flock and are losing birds. If they have birds and their birds are running around fat and sassy, ask them if you can get some fertile hatching eggs from them and do what I did and try hatching them and see what happens next.

People who keep chickens amaze me. Chickens are an often overlooked animal in the world of pets and even as farm animals it's hard to find a vet that will treat them if the need arises. That is unless you are the owner of a battery of egg or meat producing birds and then suddenly somebody takes notice of chickens as animals that need occasional medical care. Then they see potential income from providing care to a gazillion caged birds. They oft times overlook the fact that there are actually people that are willing to pay money to keep their beloved feathered pet healthy and happy. That leaves most human chicken parents stuck with having to do their own research and come up with treatments that they can handle themselves. I've seen some pretty impressive procedures done out of desperation by chicken owners that frankly have me going 'wow! I've only seen that done in a hospital surgery!'.

Who among us hasn't dug out a bumble from their favorite hen's foot with somebody holding a book or tablet for them so they can read the instructions while they worked? If you can handle that, you can handle dealing with Marek's Disease. Unfortunately, in the chicken world, saying that your flock has Marek's in it sometimes holds the same shame and connotation as standing up in church and yelling that you have an STD does. Trust me, it shouldn't.

It's not your fault. I've read posts where people say that they hold themselves responsible because they bought a bird home and put it in with their flock that looked healthy so it wasn't isolated and a year later it died of Marek's related tumors.

Bull Cookies!

A difference that makes no difference is no difference. A chicken that survives the initial onslaught of Marek's disease will look and act perfectly healthy until it keels over. You can't keep them isolated their entire life unless your name is Jeff Bezos and you have more money than good sense.

Also, if you are reading this in an attempt to garner some knowledge about the dark side of what goes into keeping chickens, warts and all, do research and find out what birds are most and least susceptible to Marek's Disease. If you have the disease in your flock, bringing in Silkies, Cochins, Seabrites, Buff Orpingtons, Welsummers, Speckled Sussex, to name a few, is ill advised. They can be found under the listing as number one with a bullet under the title of “Birds Sure to Drop Over From Marek's Disease”. Egyptian Faoumis have been proven to have a genetic resistance to Marek's disease and research is being done in an attempt to discover just why they are resistant. It's also been suggested that Naked Necked Turkens If you have done the research and you still suspect you have Marek's Disease, you probably do.

But DO NOT give up.

There is life after Marek's.

It won't be easy. You will lose birds but you won't lose all of them and most of all, it does get better. It's going to be painful. You are going to shed a bucket of tears but hang in there. You are not alone. It's been a tough 5 years for me and there were times that I was determined to quit and walk away from keeping chickens the same way we walked away from raising sheep.

But something inside me wouldn't let me be defeated. My beloved husband's love, support, strength and knowledge, has helped me through some pretty dark times. Plus I have received lots of good advice and when needed sympathy from friends here on Back Yard Chickens. The list is too long to name every member but a lot of them are on The Old Folks Home and you all know who you are. Let me take this opportunity to thank you all.

I currently have somewhere between 40 and 50 birds in my flock....or maybe 50 and 55. I never count them. Sometimes I honestly think that if I count them I'll jinx myself and my flock so I try to avoid doing it. As I tell my husband, if I don't know the exact number then he can't roll his eyes and chastise me. But as he well puts it, he can read the feed bills and do the math. Still I think he appreciates the smile on my face when I am in the coop or run, having fun with my chickens that have so far survived so it's worth it.

For now, the worst appears to be over. At least for the moment. But each morning I still go into my coop to check my flock and each day I scan each bird for signs of illness. After a while you develop a talent, if you want to call it that, for recognizing symptoms that could be related to Marek's disease in a bird. Each day that I see none, I release the deep breath I have unconsciously been holding and think to myself, Not today! But rest assured, I am always painfully aware of... The Killer in the Shadows that is Marek's Disease.

September 13,2021
Microchick/Becky

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A copy of this article with all drawings included can be read at: http://www.veloliner.com/farm/marek's_article.pdf

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