The practical poultry keeper : a complete and standard guide to the management of poultry / [Lewis Wright].

  • Wright, Lewis, 1838-1905.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The practical poultry keeper : a complete and standard guide to the management of poultry / [Lewis Wright]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    will not alone keep the fowls in good health and laying. They are omnivorous in their natural state, and require some portion of animal food. On a wide range they will provide this for themselves, and in such an establishment as figures at page 9, the scraps of the dinner-table will be quite sufficient; but if the number kept be large, with only limited accommodation, it will be necessary to buy every week a few pennyworth of bullocks’ liver, which may be boiled, chopped fine, and mixed in their food, the broth being used instead of water in mixing; these little tit-bits will be eagerly picked out and enjoyed. A very little is all that is necessary, and need not be given more than three times a week. When fowls are much over-fed with this kind of food the quills of the feathers become more or less charged with blood, which the birds in time perceive, and almost invariably pluck at each other’s plumage till they leave the skin quite bare. It is also necessary to give a caution against the use of greaves. When fowls are habitually fed upon this article their feathers speedily become disarranged and fall off, and when killed the flavour, to any ordinary palate, is disagreeable. There is yet another most important article of diet, without which it is absolutely impassible to keep fowls in health. We refer to an ample and daily supply of green or fresh vegetable food. It is not perhaps too much to say, that the omission of this is the proximate cause of nearly half the deaths where fowls are kept in confinement; whilst with it, our other directions having been observed, they may be kept in health for a long time in a pen only a few feet square. It was to provide this that, wherever they are large enough, we recom- mended the open yards, when possible, to be laid down in grass—the very best green food for poultry ; and a run of even an hour daily on such a grass plot, supposing the shed to be dry and clean, will keep them in vigorous health. But if a shed only be available, fresh vegetables must be thrown in