210 POULTRT-CRAFT. 



in giving the fowl the special care demanded by its condition, that have to be 

 taken into account. The cost of feeding and housing and caring for the con- 

 valesced fowl until again productive, must be reckoned up against doctoring. 

 When to this is added the well established fact that a fowl once dangerously 

 sick with an organic disease is afterwards worse than worthless* as a breeder, 

 the poultry keeper should have no difficulty in making his estimate of the ins 

 and outs of physicking fowls show that unless an epidemic is so mild that it 

 yields readily to simple remedies, applied in the ordinary food and drink, and 

 corrected sanitary conditions ; or an individual case not yet past the stage 

 when a very few treatments could be expected to prove effective, it is better to 

 kill than to try to cure. 



311. Some General Rules for Preventing Diseases. 



( i ) . By good care with all that that includes : correct sanitary conditions, 

 good houses, well sunned, aired or closed, according to weather and tempera- 

 ture ; proper food, exercise, cleanliness. 



(2). By quarantining all new fowls as long as there is danger of their 

 contracting diseases from or transmitting them to old stock. 



This is a matter of very great importance. The germs of some diseases to 

 which acclimated fowls have been immune often infect unacclimated fowls, 

 which are for the time less able to resist, and having thus gained a foothold 

 will successfully attack the acclimated fowls. The contrary also often happecis. 

 The new fowls bring with them the germs of disease which in their old home 

 they had successfully resisted, but to which they now succumb, and if the 

 breeder is at all careless the whole stock may be affected. 



(3). By preventing fowls from outside flocks from coming in contact with 

 members of the flock, or even feeding on the same ground. Pigeons, also, 

 should be kept away ; they are the worst disease mongers of all domestic birds. 



(4). By promptly caring for fowls which seem the least indisposed, and 

 correcting wrong conditions as soon as their effects are noted. Too often such 

 measures are neglected until disease has positively developed. 



* NOTE. Such fowls are worse than worthless as breeders, because there is born in 

 their offspring a strong tendency to contract the same disease at the age at which the 

 parents had it. It happens so often as to justify saying that it is the rule, that among 

 the offspring of fowls recovered from a severe attack of diphtheritic roup, that disease 

 will become epidemic, when the offspring of fowls which had never had the disease are 

 not at all affected, though kept under the same conditions, and sometimes in the same 

 house, unless the disease is literally forced on them by constant contact with sick fowls. 

 The loss of a single bird is at most a loss of only a few dollars. An outbreak of disease 

 among the descendants of a fowl debilitated by that disease, may cause a loss of hundreds 

 of dollars, for under such circumstances the disease is apt to be so virulent, its course so 

 rapid, that such treatment as would ordinarily succeed in the early stages of the malady, 

 proves ineffective. 



