FINISHING POULTRY FOR THE TABLE 



309 



one, and seems at first to have consisted in forcing the birds to 

 swallow solid food after their natural appetite led them to dis- 

 continue eating. This sort of hand cramming is still practiced to 

 some extent in Europe. In machine cramming liquid food is forced 

 into the crop of the bird. This method is sometimes used exclu- 

 sively and sometimes following a period of crate feeding, forcing 

 the process beyond what is possible when the bird is free to take 

 much or little food as it desires. A more .uniform product is 

 secured by cramming, though the best crate-fed stock is said to 

 be fully as well finished as that which has been crammed. 



As would be expected from the relations of the two processes, 

 cramming is less used everywhere than crate feeding. On this 

 continent the amount of machine feeding done is insignificant. 

 The advantages of special finishing methods are generally over- 

 stated by those advocating them. In a large proportion of the 

 cases in which remarkable gains in weight are made when birds 

 are crate or machine fed, much of this gain is growth which would 

 be made under any good system of feeding. The best showing for 

 special fattening methods is almost invariably made with chickens 

 at the stage of most rapid growth and with good chickens. Special 

 finishing methods are not, as is popularly supposed, methods for 

 making good poultry out of really poor poultry. They are used, 

 supplementing the work of the grower, to shorten the time 

 required to finish the birds and to put on an extra finish. It is 

 possible by their use to put much more fat onto birds than by 

 the ordinary methods of fattening, but here there is no object in 

 doing this. So far the most conspicuous result of the exploitation 

 of these methods is to increase the use of the ordinary method 

 of finishing poultry for market. 



Caponizing. In America caponizing is extensively practiced only 

 in a few districts where growing large roasting chickens is a spe- 

 cialty. A capon is a castrated cockerel. The effect of the operation 

 is not (as is popularly supposed) to greatly increase growth. On the 

 contrary, for the period during which they are usually kept before 

 marketing, a capon grows no larger than it would if it had not been 

 operated upon. The object is to keep the young males quiet, to 

 keep them soft-meated as long as possible, and to make them easier 

 to fatten. The practice is most common among growers of winter 



