POULTRY DISEASES AND THEIR TREATMENT. 1 5 



disease and a post-mortem examination showed it to be liver 

 disease. Later the roup broke out in the same house and this 

 dread disease continued with the flock for months exacting a 

 heavy toll in laying hens." 



C. Avoid Dampness. Of all unfavorable environmental 

 conditions into which poultry may, by bad management, be 

 brought, a damp house is probably the worst. Nothing will 

 diminish the productivity of a flock so quickly and surely as 

 will dampness in the house, and nothing is so certain and speedy 

 an excitant to roup and kindred ills. The place zvhcre poultry 

 are housed must be kept dry if the flock is to he productive 

 and free from disease. 



D. Provide Clean and Dry Litter. Experience has demon- 

 strated that the best way in which to give fowls exercise during 

 the winter months in which, in northern climates at least, they 

 must be housed the greater part if not all of the time, is by pro- 

 viding a deep litter in which the birds scratch for their dry 

 grain ration. For this litter the Experiment Station uses pine 

 planer shavings, with a layer of straw on top. Whatever the 

 litter it should be changed as often as it gets damp or dirty. 



II. HYGIENIC FEEDING. 



Along with housing as a prime factor in poultry sanitation 

 goes feeding. This is not the place to enter upon a detailed dis- 

 cussion of the compounding of rations and such topics, but there 

 are certain basic principles of hygienic feeding which must 

 always be looked after if one is to avoid diseases. There are : 



A. Purity. It should be a rule of every poultryman never 

 to feed any material which is not clean and wholesome. Musty 

 and mouldy grain, tainted meat scraps or cut bone, -table scraps 

 which have spoiled, and decayed fruits or vegetables should 

 never be fed. If this consideration were always kept in mind 

 many cases of undiagnosed sickness and deaths, and low condi- 

 tion in the stock would be avoided. Keep all utensils in which 

 food is placed clean. 



B. Avoid Overfeeding. Intensive poultry keeping involves 

 of necessity heavy feeding, but one should constantly be on 

 the lookout to guard against overfeeding, which puts the bird 

 into a state of lowered vitality in which its natural powers of 

 resistance to all forms of infectious and other diseases are re- 

 duced. The feeding of high protein concentrates like linseed or 



