CHAPTER VIII 
DISEASES 
For the study of the classification and description of the 
numerous ailments by which individual fowls pass to their 
untimely end, I recommend any of the numerous books writ- 
ten upon the subject. Some of these works are more accurate 
than others, but that I consider immaterial. The study of 
these diseases is good for the poultryman, it gives his mind 
exercise. When a boy in high school I studied Latin for the 
same purpose. 
Don’t Doctor Chickens. 
For the cure of all poultry diseases when they have passed 
a point when the fowl does not eat or for other reasons re- 
covery is improbable, I recommend a blow on the head—the 
hatchet spills the blood which is unwise. 
The usual formula of “burn or bury deeply” is somewhat 
troublesome, unless you have a‘furnace running. A covered 
pit is more convenient if far enough removed from the house 
that the odor is not prohibitive. A post with a tally card 
may be planted near by. This part of the poultry farm may 
be marked “Exhibit A,” and shown first to the visitor during 
the busy season. If he is one of those prospective pleasure 
and profit poultrymen who propose to disregard all facts of 
biology and economics of production, you may save yourself 
the trouble of showing him the rest of the plant. Unfor- 
tunately, this scheme is not open to the poultryman who has 
breeding stock for sale. 
I have frequently had the question put to me in the smoker 
of a Pullman car, “Do not epidemic diseases make the poultry 
business precarious?” Such questions came from farm-raised 
men, but not from poultry farmers. Poultrymen should figure 
a certain loss of birds just as insurance companies figure on 
the human death rate, but to all practical intents and pur- 
poses the epidemic disease has been banished from the poultry 
farms and seldom if ever enters the records in answer to the 
question, “Why do poultry farms fail?” 
Some of my readers may take exception to me either in 
regard to roup or white diarrhoea. Roup is a disease of the 
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