How much medicine/drug advice is appropriate? [duplicate]

Question

Can I give human medicine to chickens? is the question that has caused me to ask this.

I answered the question saying that any human medicine should be prescribed and monitored by someone with direct knowledge of the situation. Granted, I have no proof to back up my "claim" that human medicine is bad for animals across the board. But my worry is that we're going to start a trend of "Is {drug} safe for {animal}?". To me, it could become a scary situation when someone two years from now could stumble on the post and give the drug to their animal and do serious harm to it because it reacted differently.

So how should we handle these questions as the community grows?

Answer 1

I think that the specific question is too broad and should be closed. Some medicine may be perfectly safe, where some medicine is not. In addition because it is chickens there is the concern that the chickens in addition to being pets are producing eggs that are consumed.

StevenV gave a great general answer that in most cases you should consult either a vet or a qualified pharmasist before providing any medicine to an animal. I would hate to see this answer become our goto close as a duplicate for any similar question that is more specific though.

Based on past experience with other SE Betas (this is my 9th commitment) we should attract some high quality experts. Some of these questions will be answerable. We should not bar these questions just because the majority of our community does not know what the right answer is.