12 THE CALL OF THE HEN. 



"A COMMON QUESTION WISELY ANSWERED. 

 ''By George Scott. 



"Can a living be made from poultry? Probably there 

 is no one who has attained distinction in the avicultural 

 arena to whom this question has not been put hundreds of 

 times; and it is a question of perennial interest to the poultry- 

 keeping public. There are many people who will tell you 

 that a living, and a good living, can be made from poultry- 

 keeping alone, and as proof of their statement will point out 

 the numerous men whose names are household words in 

 the fancy. On the other hand, a vast majority will most 

 emphatically give utterance to statements calculated to deter 

 any poultry-keeping aspirant, and give weight to their con- 

 tention by citing hundreds of cases where men have tried and 

 failed. Truly the mass of evidence appears to be with the 

 latter belief, for it is an indubitable fact that for every per- 

 son who succeeds in this business a hundred fail. But, 

 looking at the matter from a logical point of view, the fact 

 that a minority rely on poultry for their daily bread is ample 

 evidence that it is quite possible to make a living out of 

 poultry-keeping, and the abnormal number of failures merely 

 proves that the business is a difficult one. 



"The fact that a man who has failed in some other busi- 

 ness takes up poultry-keeping with a like result in no sense 

 proves that poultry-keeping does not pay; it is only what 

 could be expected, and any experienced aviculturist would 

 have prophesied such a result. It is, however, useless to 

 explain such things to the man who is contemplating start- 

 ing a poultry farm. To suggest that he is unfit for the task 

 would be taken by him as an insult, for the public, in its ig- 

 norance, has conceived the idea that poultry-management is 

 the simplest work that anyone can think of in fact, I ques- 

 tion whether an outsider considers it to be work at all. 



"Such a hold has this belief obtained on the man in the 

 street that it almost amounts to a superstition, and until 

 the fallacy is exploded the number of the unsuccessful will 

 be constantly increased. The public, apparently, cannot 

 understand the difference between keeping a few fowls as a 

 paying hobby and managing a poultry farm as an enormous 



