Terrible Twine

One thing I always stress (among many others I hasten to add) to volunteers helping out with the rescue, is to bin twine. Those pieces of green or brown string around the bales of hay have a habit of escaping, and the perils of ingested and entangled twine are well documented. Well I now have another peril to add to the list that, unfortunately, I was responsible for. On letting the chickens out of the large coop the other week I found one of the Buff Orpington mixes hanging upside down, suspended by her feet from one of the perches. She had managed to pick up, and wrap around her feet, the cotton strand from the top of a feed bag, which I had inadvertently let drop on the floor of the coop. In her scratching in the sawdust of the coop she must have got it totally entwined around both feet, and then hopped up onto the perch, slipped and caught the cotton on a splinter of the perch. Luckily she couldn't have been hanging long, although at first sight I thought I had lost her, as once I had her upright and in my lap she rapidly recovered. Getting the cotton off was not easy, but we were lucky in that it hadn't cut into her legs.

So, I add another peril to our list of things to be careful with, and learn a lesson which, fortunately, didn't end in tragedy.