AN EASY START 35 
At the start, the problem of breeding squabs for market 
is in your favor, because one hundred pairs of breeding 
pigeons may be handled as easily and as rapidly as one pair. 
Try to keep this numerical advantage in your favor all the 
time. Discard every plan that cuts down the efficiency ‘of 
your own labor, and adopt every device that will give you 
control in the same time over a greater number of pigeons. 
It takes brains and skilled labor to run a poultry plant 
successfully. Every poultryman knows that he cannot 
entrust the regulation of temperatures of incubators and 
brooders to an ignorant hired man, but even a boy or girl, or 
under-the-average farm hand, knows enough to fill up the 
bath pans and feeding troughs for squab-brééders, leaving 
the time of the owner free for correspondence and the more 
skilful work. 
The primary object is to breed squabs for market as cheaply, 
as easily and as fast as possible, without the expenditure of a 
dollar for fanciful or impractical appurtenances. ~~ 
Do not think it is necessary to heat your squab house. A 
squab house which has the chill of dampness taken off it by 
hot water or steam pipes will raise more squabs than a house 
not heated, but a flock of pigeons in a small house throw off 
considerable heat from their bodies and will breed in cold 
weather all right. After you have developed your plant and 
have a large business which you wish to keep at the highest 
state of efficiency, you may heat your squab house. The idea 
of heat in winter time is to keep the birds more contented and 
get more squabs out of them, and not at all to keep them 
alive. Do not be afraid that your pigeons will freeze to 
death. We have many customers in Canada. In coldest 
weather, the old birds hover the squabs more carefully. 
City people can keep pigeons in the garret of a house, or the 
loft of a barn, without a foot of ground being needed. In 
such a case the flying pen, or place to which the pigeons go 
for sun and air, can be built out on a platform. The illus- 
tration (page 24) shows how to utilize a window of a garret. 
If you think that rats will’trouble you in either a garret or 
barn loft, cover the floor inside, especially the corners, with 
fine wire netting through which it will be impossible for the 
rats to gnaw from below. 
One of our customers in Illinois, a rich horse breeder having 
