Laying House, Hopland Stock Farm, Cal. 



Want Reasons Rather Than Rules 



Rules are for the child; the man asks to know the reason for them; instruc- 

 tions are arbitrary and will not always fit conditions. In the nature of things, 

 we must learn from others, but our real knowledge is the product of experience. 



Poultry raising is not a kind of happy-go-lucky venture; it is not a quick and 

 short road to fortune; there is no "knack" of feeding or secret of breeding or 

 management, and blame for failure to make it pay should not be laid upon the 

 seemingly perverse fact that now hens will lay and now they won't. 



The hen is not a lawless creature; it is only a question of understanding her 

 of studying her under confinement and as effected by restraint, by different foods, 

 by changes of temperature, by over-feeding, by crowding and bad air. She is an 

 egg layer; this is her business under the changes effected by domestication and 

 breeding, and success will come from knowing how to treat her, how to house and 

 feed her and how to work with her along the line of her especial and distinguishing 

 function as a nervous, sensitive, highly developed organism for the production 

 of eggs. 



The Hen Once Wild and Free 



We may not forget this. It is important that we should recall her wild 

 progenitors, the jungle fowl of India, Southern China and the East Indies, and 

 along another line of descent, probably an extinct progenitor of the Aseel or 

 Malay fowl. We must take into account her wild origin; domestication has not 

 deprived her of all her wild traits, but it has changed her from a mere mother 

 hen, intent on raising a brood, to an egg-laying bird, a creature whose chief 

 function is to lay eggs for the people who feed her. 



This is not natural not her primal nature. It is no more natural for the 

 hen to lay eggs for my breakfast or for the market than it is for the crow or the 

 wild duck of the marshes to do so. 



