I don't think it matters what the disease is, in the end you have to decide what the quality of life is. We lost another one of our Serama chickens a little more than a week ago. I decided not to say anything because I couldn't deal with it. I feel like a failure where these chickens are concerned and Jon and I are waiting for the next one to drop. We can keep multiple parrots alive for years, but we can't get a chicken past 8 months of age. We had to take Maddie in to the UW's emergency care a week ago last Tuesday night because she couldn't breathe. I thought she was going to die right in my hands on the way there. She held on all night, we did a CT scan to see what was blocking her breathing and saw something that was blocking her trachea so decided to scope her but saw nothing there either. The vets said that it almost looked like her trachea was just collapsing on itself. We could have done surgery on her but the trachea on these chickens is so small that the scar tissue from the surgery was probably going to impede her breathing anyway and her quality of life after surgery was probably going to be worse than what it was before surgery. We choose to put her down and it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do...she was only six months old. Gross necropsy has shown nothing so we're waiting for the histopathology results.
For PDD, six or seven years ago, a bird that started showing signs that seemed like it might be PDD, many vets would automatically tell the owner to just put the bird down. I've heard horror stories of people doing so and then finding afterwards that it wasn't even PDD. We've come a long way and PDD is very treatable now and birds can live long lives, allbeit on very expensive drugs. I would never listen to any vet who told me to put down a bird unless that bird was in really bad condition and there didn't seem to be any hope and I had exhausted all possibilities. Like Sarah said, if she would have listened to the vets she had seen early on, she wouldn't have Korbel with her today. Sometimes you have to trust your gut.
I also wanted to say that when a bird is going downhill from PDD, it tends to happen pretty quickly. They stop eating within a matter of weeks and are gone in a month or two and succumb to the disease. You know when it's time to let go. I can't imagine any vet in the US or Canada who would be willing to rebuild a crop in a PDD supposed bird to give that bird a few more weeks. That vet should be sued.
I feel the same way about giving chemo to any animal for cancer. They don't understand what's happening and can't make the decision to go through that so I don't agree with it. My friend who has had cancer and chemo said she wouldn't go through it again if it came back. That tells me we don't have the right to subject an animal to it. And usually it just prolongs their life a little.
