Bandit lives in my parrot room now.  I'm not saying this is the right thing to do for everyone.  I have a vet that treats both chickens and parrots.  He's seen Bandit and gave me options on what to do with her leg.  The surgery to re-attach her leg was extremely expensive and uncertain on its success.  I'm unusual there aren't alot of people who take their chickens to the vet.  Rather than euthanize her he gave me the opportunity to try doing physical therapy or what I call "chick therapy". 

As you can see by the photographs her improvement has been unbelievable.  She uses her bad leg more like a crutch and is still unable to walk forward so moves backward instead.  She used to only go backwards until she ran into a wall and then that was then end.  Now she's learned to turn in circles to get where she wants to go. 

Unfortunately her exercising was very restricted because chickens cannot be trained to hold their bowel movements like parrots can.  I did research and believe it or not there is such a thing as chicken diapers.  Bandits life is about to change dramatically!  I've ordered two sets of these and now she will be able to get out and really move about which should allow her to really build up some strength. 

Also this will help with the cage set up that I currently have for her.  Normally when I have chickens inside the house I have them on wood shavings which helps tremendously with odor absorption.  Unfortunately she cannot stand on wood shavings she doesn't have enough strength to stabilize on that type of material.  She is in a parrot cage, on a bath mat which is set on the lower part of the cage with the rubber backing holding the mat stable for her.  Below that is newspaper to catch anything that falls below or around the rug as she has a tendancy to back into corners. 

Stay tuned! 

For more information on chicken diapers visit www.chickendiapers.com it's a terrific site make sure and visit the gallery pages for some very awesome photographs of very well loved chickens.