210 POULTRY-CRAFT. 
in giving the fowl the special care demanded by its condition, that have to be 
taken into account. The cost of feeding and housing and caring for the con- 
valesced fowl until again productive, must be reckoned up against doctoring. 
When to this is added the well established fact that a fowl once dangerously 
sick with an organic disease is afterwards worse than worthless* as a breeder, 
the poultry keeper should have no difficulty in making his estimate of the zs 
and outs of physicking fowls show that unless an epidemic is so mild that it 
yields readily to simple remedies, applied in the ordinary food and drink, and 
corrected sanitary conditions ;— or an individual case not yet past the stage 
when a very few treatments could be expected to prove effective, it is hetter to 
kill than to try to cure. 
311. Some General Rules for Preventing Diseases. 
(1). By good care— with all that that includes: correct sanitary conditions, 
good houses, well sunned, aired or closed, according to weather and tempera- 
ture; proper food, exercise, cleanliness. 
(2). By quarantining all new fowls as long’ as there is danger of their 
contracting diseases from or transmitting them to old stock. 
This is a matter of very great importance. The germs of some diseases to 
which acclimated fowls have been immune often infect unacclimated fowls, 
which are for the time less able to resist, and having thus gained a foothold 
will successfully attack the acclimated fowls. The contrary also often happens. 
The new fowls bring with them the germs of disease which in their old home 
they had successfully resisted, but to which they now succumb, and if the 
breeder is at all careless the whole stock may be affected. 
(3). By preventing fowls from outside flocks from coming in contact with 
members of the flock, or even feeding on the same ground. Pigeons, also, 
should, be kept away ; they are the worst disease mongers of all domestic birds. 
(4). By promptly caring for fowls which seem the least indisposed, and 
correcting wrong conditions as soon as their effects are noted. Too often such 
measures are neglected until disease has positively developed. 
* Note.— Such fowls are worse than worthless as breeders, because there is born in 
their offspring a strong tendency to contract the same disease at the age at which the 
parents had it. It happens so often as to justify saying that it is the rule, that among 
the offspring of fowls recovered from a severe attack of diphtheritic roup, that disease 
will become epidemic, when the offspring of fowls which had never had the disease are 
not at all affected, though kept under the same conditions, and sometimes in the same 
house, unless the disease is literally forced on them by constant contact with sick fowls. 
The loss of a single bird is at most a loss of only a few dollars. An outbreak of disease 
among the descendants of a fowl debilitated by that disease, may cause a loss of hundreds 
of dollars, for under such circumstances the disease is apt to be so virulent, its course so 
rapid, that such treatment as would ordinarily succeed in the early stages of the malady, 
proves ineffective. 
