# Fish Zole and Canker



## pigeon_guy (May 26, 2008)

I've been raising an adolescent feral pigeon for the past few weeks with the gracious help and advice of many on this site. Several folks have suggested that the bird might have canker, and I've gotten some fish zole for treatment. I did some searches on the forum here to figure out how to administer the fish zole, and there seems to be a lot of different opinions on that. The tablets are 250 mg. The bird weighs 200 gm. Should I just grind up some fish zole and put it in the bird's water? What sort of dosage, length of treatment time etc. is appropriate?

Also, since I have 100 tablets, which is lots more than I'll need, I was thinking about treating my local feral flock with the extra. So any suggestions on dosage and methods for that application would be appreciated as well.


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## Pidgey (May 20, 2005)

I can't speak for FishZole in particular, but most Metronidazole tablets don't seem to be worth much for dissolving reliably in water. As such, I usually just cut the tablets up and give pieces of them according to the size of the bird. Metronidazole has a very wide safety factor and, as such, the dosage regimens differ very widely in the formularies. Drugs usually work on "half-lives" and so some dosing strategies are designed to make dosing once a day instead of two, three or even four times per day to make it easier. Due to the way a half-life works, that can mean that the bird can get several times more actual medicine in a 24 hour period with a once-per-day dosing than with a multiple-times-per-day dosing.

That said, you can get away with virtually any of them and be okay, although in theory we'd always like to give the least amount of the stuff that will actually do the job adequately. Trouble is, you never know what that amount is except by doing it and it working out later. The most you'd want to give him would be 1/5 of the tablet, once per day. The least would be about 1/62.5th of the tablet, twice a day, which would obviously be pretty difficult to measure without a very fine lab balance. You might try seeing if you can quarter the tablet and then halving those to see if you can get them that small reliably.

Pidgey


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## John_D (Jan 24, 2002)

You would probably be better off using Spartrix, as there's no messing around with how to achieve the right dose. Like most meds, though, you end up with many more tabs than you need - at least, until the next one... and the one after that...

John


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## pigeon_guy (May 26, 2008)

Thanks Pidgey & John D. 

So I'm going to try for 1/10 of a tablet twice per day. What will happen if I give him a bit too much? Will he act sick, or keel over and die, or what?

For the benefit of others who might read this thread, I wanted to share the method I came up with for measuring the dosage.

I ground up one tablet into a fine powder, and mixed it with water in one corner of a plastic sandwich bag. After a few minutes, the powder settled out and I used a paper towel to drain off the top layer of almost-clear water. That left a slurry-like substance that I could try to suck up with a syringe. Not all of it got pulled into the syringe because the top of the slurry was less dense and had more water in it than the bottom part. That let me get a fairly good estimate though, that one tablet corresponded to about 0.8 cc of powder. Since the syringe has 10 small marks for each 0.1 cc mark, I can get a good estimate of 1/10 of a tablet as 0.08 cc. Now, obviously, I've lost some of the tablet in the grinding and mixing process, and since the mixture isn't a uniform density, I'm probably ending up with less than 1/10 of a tablet, but certainly more than 1/20 of a tablet. Since Pidgey says the lowest dose would be 1/60 or so, the 0.08cc should fall safely within the range. 

To administer the Fish Zole slurry, I suck up a little clear water in the syringe and then suck up the slurry I made from the pill. When I squirt this into the bird's gullet, the medicine gets in there first, since it was the last thing I pulled into the syringe. 

If anyone has any other methods that work well, or suggestions of what I can do to improve what I came up with here, please post a reply.


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