THE AKT OF POULTKY FATTENING 75 



The next most profitable district is the counties 

 of Surrey, Sussex and Kent, England, where whole 

 families are engaged in it, as were their ancestors for 

 generations back. They know nothing else, they never 

 have done and their children never will do anything 

 else but fatten poultry for the London market. The 

 method employed is both trough feeding and the 

 cramming machine, some using one, some the other, 

 and many a combination of the two. The trough alone 

 is not so profitable but enables more fowls to be kept in 

 process. Ten days of trough and ten machine feeding 

 is more profitable, but the best results are obtained by 

 machine feeding from start to finish, care being taken 

 to not overfeed during the first week, gradually getting 

 them up to full feed. These results are secured 

 through the ability of the bird to digest and assimilate 

 two or three times as much feed as it would consume 

 from a trough if left to its own inclination. The food 

 is made semi-liquid and no water or grit is given in 

 addition to it, but it must be ground to a meal and be 

 composed of just such material as will produce these 

 results without sickening or injuring the bird. By this 

 method they are able to add three or more pounds of 

 meat to a four-pound bird in twenty-one days at what 

 would be in this country a cost in feed of about eight 

 cents per bird for the twenty-one days, and in turn make 

 a profit not only on the weight gained but an increase 

 per pound for quality and finish; the perfectly finished 

 bird having what fat it carries deposited in globules 

 throughout the tissue, rendering it of that superior 

 quality demanded. 



If these "fatters," as they are called, are able to 

 buy the ten to twelve-weeks-old Irish birds sent over 

 for this purpose at sevent^^-five cents each, pay the 

 enormous prices they are compelled to for feed and sell 

 their products at a profit, what is to prevent Americans 



