■Rational 5tant)ar& Squab Booft. 



CHAPTER I. 



SQUABS PAY. 



Experience ol a Customer who Started in January, 1902, Erected a Plant 

 Wortli $3,000 and Made iVJouey Almost from the Start— Settlements 

 of Squab Breeders in ]o\va, California, New Jersey and Pennsyl- 

 vania — Large Incomes Made trom Pigeons — Squah Plants Known to 

 be Making Money — The Hard Working Farmer and the Easy Work- 

 ing Squab Kaiser — No Occupation for a Drone — No Exaggeration. 



■'Will it pay me to raise squabs?" is the first question which the be- 

 ginner asks. We take the case of a man who bought a Manual in January, 

 1902. His boys had kept a few pigeons but had never handled them in a 

 commercial way, nor tried to make any money with them. The reading 

 of the book gave him the first real li.ght on the squa'b industry. Possibly 

 he was more ready to believe because he knew from his own personal ex- 

 perience that a squa'b grows to market size in four weeks aud is then 

 readily marketable. Anyway, he started at once to build a squab house 

 according to the directions given. The ground was too hard for him to 

 get a pickaxe into, so he laid the foundation timbers on bricks, rushed 

 the work ahead with the help of good carpenters and sent on his order for 

 breeding stock. In the course of a few weeks lie ordered a second lot of 

 breeders, followed by a third and a fourth, and he kept adding new build- 

 ings. When spring came and the ground softened, he jacked up his first 

 squab house, took out the bricks at the four corners and put in cedar 

 posts. By the middle of -July he had five handsome sqtiab houses and fly- 

 ing pens, all built by skilled labor in the best possible style at a cost of at 

 least $300 apiece. With his buildiugs and their fittings and his birds, his 

 plant now (August, 1902) stands for an expenditure of between $2,000 and 

 $3,000. His next move, this fall, will be to buy a farm where he can have 

 more room, and which will be auxiliary to his present plant. 



This gentleman lives in a locality where he bad to put up nice-looking 

 buildings, or the neighbors would have complained. He spent probably 

 three times more money on his liuildings than the average heginner would 

 spend. He is a superintendent of a large manufacturing plant, a man of 

 push and energy, and he has lour young boys in his family who have 

 helped with the wife and grandfather to make the venture successful. It 

 has been a paying venture almost from the very start. Everything that 

 we wrote about squabs as money makers came true in his case. One of 



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