National Standard Squab Book. 65 



now and then with a litrle feed and you will attract it. Catch it when 

 you hare a favorable opportunity either with a net on the end of a pole. 

 or with a broom, pinnintc it into a corner. You may have to try several 

 times, but you will get it after a while. Its eye "will be brighter and 

 signs of disease will be gone, and yon can put it back into the squab 

 house with the others. The exercise, sunlight, change of food, and scanty 

 food, have made the cure. There are few pigeons so bad with canker that 

 they cannot be cured in this way. For that reason we have not much 

 hi'silation in saying that canker is a captivity disease, caused by lack 

 of e.xercise as well as unavoidable filth and too much of the wroug kiud 

 of feed. We have observed wild pigeons in the streets and we never 

 saw a case of canker among them. You may say to yourself that it is 

 quite a risk to throw out into the open air a pigeon which has cost you 

 from 75 cents to a dollar, but it is better to do this than to take the 

 advice of all other breeders and books and kill it. 



Powdered alum sprinkled in the drinking water now and then will tend 

 to ward off canker from a fiock. 



It does not pay to dose sick pigeons, because a cure seldom is obtained 

 by dosing, and you are out your time. The only remedies you need are 

 powdered alum and common brown ginger. The brown ginger is for the 

 purjiose of counteracting any tendency to diarrhoea which you may ob- 

 serve. Sprinkle it in the drinking water. 



The squab breeder who follows the advice as to feed and water, and 

 cleanliness of squab house, given in this Manual, will not have any sick 

 pigeons. It is so very eas,^• to keep a pigeon in perfect health that the 

 fnar of disease is a bugbear not worth taking into account. The element 

 of disease is a constant source of worry to the chicken breeder, and a 

 source of heavy loss to the best of them. We wish to assure all who 

 contemplate starting in the squab breeding business that the pigeon nat- 

 urally is a healthier and more rugged bird than the domestic hen and that 

 positively you will not be fussing with remedies and curealls, in handling 

 them. 



"Going light," or wasting away, is an ailment of pigeons occasionally 

 met with. The cause of it is an absence of grit and salt. If your staples 

 of feed are provided as we tell, and you give a variety of feed, and you 

 provide grit and oyster shells, you will have no cases of "going light." 

 The disease is known by a steady wasting away of the pigeon. Catch 

 it and you feel a prominent breast bone, and scanty flesh, showing that 

 some element in Ihe feed is lacking. 



The principal cause of these ailments of pigeons, next to filth, is too 

 much corn. Com is carbonaceous and produces fat, which heats the 

 hlood and lays the system open to disease. 



