HOUSE PLANS AND SPECIFICATIONS 
is the ideal way of housing and yarding poultry, 
and we recommend it to all who can possibly make 
use of it. It is impractical, however, where thou- 
sands of birds are kept, as the scattered houses 
make too much extra work and inconvenience. 
In a long continuous house, in case of an epi- 
demic or contagious disease, it is liable to spread 
from one or two pens to every pen in the building, 
but the colony system of housing keeps the flocks 
too widely separated for any general catastrophe. 
With the colony system any style of house may be 
used—either regular colony houses or one-pen or 
two-pen continuous houses, or the same-sized 
scratching-shed houses. 
People who must necessarily use long continuous 
houses, on account of lack of yard room, will find 
that as a general thing the shorter houses give 
vastly superior results to the quite long ones. 
Attractive Poultry Houses. No particular effort 
has been made to show especially beautiful poultry 
houses in this book. All buildings and coops illus- 
trated and described are, first and above all else, 
practical; although at the same time I do not think 
any of them can be called positively unattractive 
or repulsive. The houses shown can, if desired, 
be constructed as cheaply as is compatible with 
satisfactory results in any house, and at the same 
time the man who wants a fancy hen-house can 
have his desire fulfilled in this same style of house 
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