National Standard Squab Book. 65 
now and then with a litile feed and you will attract it. Catch it when 
you have a favorable opportunity either with a net on the end of a pole, 
or with a broom, pinning 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 you 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 
hesitation in saying that canker is a captivity disease, caused by lack 
of exercise as well as unavoidable filth and too much of the wrong kind 
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 cf 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 flock. 
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 
purpose 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 easy to keep a pigeon in perfect health that the 
fear 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 the feed is lacking. 
The principal cause of these ailments of pigeons, next to filth, is too 
much corn. Corn is carbonaceous and produces fat, which heats the 
blood and lays the system open to disease. 
