THE CALL OF THE HEN. 15 



dairy farm for they have been bred for years for beef, and prac- 

 tically everything fed to them goes to meat, while it would 

 be just as foolish to buy a herd of Jersey cows and expect to 

 make a living from them raising beef, as they have been bred 

 for years for butter fat and practically everything fed to them 

 goes to milk and crean. If the reader's experience has been 

 with horses, he is aware that a man engaged in teaming would 

 not select the trotting type of horse, neither would a turf- 

 man put his money on an 1800-pound Clyde' horse if the bal- 

 ance of the field were trotting horses. That would not be horse 

 sense. Now the same comparison holds good in the poultry 

 field, except with this difference, that the egg type and meat 

 type in poultry have never,been segregated into different breeds 

 and each breed bred for a number of years along the line it 

 was intended for the egg type bred for eggs alone, and all 

 birds inclined to meat production discarded, both male and 

 female, and the meat type bred for meat, without regard to 

 eggs except enough to perpetuate the species, just as the 

 typical butter cattle and typical beef cattle have been bred. 



I have seen a great n^any cases like the first mentioned 

 article, where a person would go into the poultry business, 

 and get started with stock that was of the meat type, and 

 not knowing any better, would think that all poultry was the 

 same as his, and the only way any money could be made in 

 the business was to sell fancy birds and eggs at fancy prices.. 

 Now these people are not to blame for what they do not know. 

 They think their hens are as good layers as any other hens, 

 and they have no way of knowing any better. 



I have also seen a great many cases like Mrs. Basley 

 writes of, except the profits were not so large, owing to dif- 

 ferent environment I suppose. These people had the same 

 breed of hens as the parties before mentioned, but they were 

 fortunate in getting the egg type, and they made money with 

 their hens. Each one thinks every other person's hens are 

 the same as theirs if they are the same breed, and that is the 

 reason there are so many different conflicting statements in 

 the poultry papers, and not because the writers are not intel- 

 ligent or not truthful as some suppose. From a scientific 

 point of view, and apart from the fancy, and as far as the 

 knowledge of meat and egg production is concerned, the poul- 

 try business is in its infancy, and the people who write for the 



