HINTS ON POULTRY FEEDING.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2460, 23 February 1882, Page 4

HINTS ON POULTRY FEEDING.

Have a system in feeding, and give them three times a day at least a regular allowance of varied food—all they will eat up clean, and “look slyly over their shoulders for more.” It is not feeding well to stint the birds (particularly when confined, where they cannot forage for their partial subsistence) and furnish them with only half rations. This is starvation, not economy. Give them enough—not too much —and of that which is good for them. So they will thrive, because you will then be feeding them well. It is not feeding well to stuff domestic fowls with oily scraps, stale raw meat, sour meal, and old offal—when, with but a little more labor and oaro, you can give them a moderate and systematic allowance of cooked meat, fresh-scalded meal daily, and softened scraps or table offal free from mould and offensive acids. If you wish to sicken and disgust your penned-up fowls with their fare, and yourself alike, follow the latter unwise course ; but do not cajole yourself into the notion that under this plan you are “feeding well.” Feeding well means that you afford your poultry sufficient for their daily needs, of a quality and in quantity that will best appease a regular, habitual—not a transient and vicioU'—appetite. All they can take up at a time comfortably, without gorging, is ample. Let the periods for feeding bo triple daily for old fowls, and four to eight times a day for young stock. Give them plenty of fresh clean water to drink ; alternate their cooked vegetable food with sound grain?. Give them a range if you can, where they may pick up part of their living, ind never allow them to get desperately hungry through your neglect, DISEASES OP POULTRY. In the following article we shall treat of a few of the troubles incident to fowl life, and attacking organs which are very sensitive, and the treatment of which is too little understood. At these times in fall or winter, when cold weather comes “ down like a wolf on the fold,” or during the raw, damp spring, the keeper is often so completely unprepared for sickness of the kind among bis flock, that before he fairly regains his equilibrium bis fowls have begun to disappear like leaves before the blast.

So far as concerns fowls, there is no use in attempting to discriminate between catarrh and bronchitis. Both are cold, but bronchitis ia a deep cold, and affects more deeply the breathing apparatus. Fowls are particularly liable to cold, as the air cells occupy so large a part of their physical framework. Where there is a slight cold, put the fowl in a warm, sunny place, give warm food, and nothing more will be needed. The same method should be* pursued in hard cold. If there is much fever, put four drops of tincture of aconite into the water. Or sweeten it and make it a little sour with sulphuric or nitric acid. Add to the food a pinch of ginger or cayenne pepper. If there is much swelling about the head, a mild purge will be useful. The homeopaths give mercury vivus for slight colds, eupbrasia for more serious ones ; each thrice daily, adding aconite for the fever. A roup may only begin with catarrh, and, like roup, catarrh and bronchitis sometimes cause death. But how are we to know suoh oases from roup ? Simply by the offensive discharge at the beak which oharateriaes the latter disease. When the fowl has a discharge at the beak that is not offensive, you may call it s simple oatairb, or common cold. When the odour is bad it is roup. No better distinction is possible in the present state of knowledge of fowl ailments. Give the German roup pills in either case. There is hardly an ill fowl to which this medicine is not applicable, as they are a serviceable tonic-,

The difficulty in telling these maladies apart will suggest to the careful poulterer prompt isolation of all cases where he is not certain.

Cough may come from parasites in the air passages. This applies more particularly to the sneezing effort caused by the gape-worm in the throat of young chickens. A spasmodic cough, lasting a whole day, even, is reported as having accompanied the epizootic. It yielded under a treatment with potash. Consumption, or tubercular deposit, may be suspected where a cough does not yield to treatment, and admits of no other explanation. Cod-liver oil in barley meal would be the treatment it any one really wanted to save consumptive fowls. It ought to be killed.

Asthma is nothing else than roup as far as we know, and very likely this name may have been given to cases of that sort. —“ American Poultry Yard.”