10 POULTRY DISEASES AND THEIE TREATMENT. 



discussion of the hygiene of incubation, or of the relative merits 

 of artificially and naturally hatched chickens will be undertaken 

 here, because there are special subjects falling outside the field 

 of general poultry hygiene. 



I. POULTRY HOUSE HYGIENE AND SANITATION. 



A. Cleanliness. — The thing of paramount importance in the 

 hygienic housing of poultry is cleanliness. By this is meant not 

 merely plain, ordinary cleaning up, in the housewife sense, but 

 also bacteriological cleaning up; that is, disinfection.. All build- 

 ings or structures of whatever kind in which poultry are housed 

 during any part of their lives should be subjected to a most 

 thorough and searching cleaning and disinfection at least once 

 every year. This cleaning up should naturally come for each 

 different structure (i. e., laying, colony or brooder house, indi- 

 vidual brooder, incubator, etc.) at a time which just precedes 

 the putting of new stock into this structure. 



How to clean a poultry house: Not every poultryman of 

 experience even, knows how really to clean up a poultry house. 

 The first thing to do is to' remove all the litter and loose dirt 

 which can be shovelled out. Then give the house — floor, wall.s 

 and ceiling — a thorough sweeping and shovel out the accumu- 

 lated debris. Then play a garden hose, with the maximum water 

 pressure which can be obtained, upon floor, roosting boards, 

 walls and ceiling, until all the dirt which washes down easily is 

 disposed of. Then take a heavy hoe or roost board scraper and 

 proceed to scrape the floor and roosting boards, clean of the 

 trampled, and caked dressing and dirt. Then shovel out what 

 has been accumulated and get the hose into action once more and 

 wash the whole place down again thoroughly and follow this 

 with another scraping. With a stiff bristled broom thoroughly 

 scrub walls, floors, nest boxes, roost boards, etc. Then after 

 another rinsing down and cleaning out of accumulated dirt, let 

 the house dry out for a day or two. Then make a searching 

 inspection to see if any dirt can be discovered. If so apply the 

 appropriate treatment as outlined above. If, however, every- 

 thing app'ears to be clean, the time has come to make it really 

 clean by disinfection. To do this it is necessary to spray or 

 thoroughly wash with a scrub brush wet in the solution used all 

 parts of the house with a good disinfectant at least twice, allow- 

 ing time between for it to dry. For this purpose 3 per cent 



