Feeding 75 



they are not very hungry (hens should be very hungry all 

 the time when fed Ration No. 14 or No. 9). Many of them 

 remain on the roosts all night and all day. (No matter how 

 good a flock of chickens the novice in the poultry business 

 buys and whatever their sex, by inexperience and wrong 

 feeding he will turn them in a short time into roosters). 



We shall start feeding -these hens on the Foundation 

 Ration No. 1. We have about 1,000 hens in this flock, and 

 we see that after the second day a large number of them 

 refuse to eat grain and stand around. We find out that 

 while Ration No. 1 worked well with a small pen of hens 

 with good digestion it is worthless on a large flock with 

 poor digestion, and so we shall go to Ration No. 2. We 

 feed this ration for a short time, but the grain we are using 

 is inclined to be laxative and we find some of the droppings 

 are very watery. If we continue this feed, it will result 

 seriously to many hens. We notice that the hens in the 

 worst condition have bowel-trouble, inclining to white- 

 diarrhoea. 



Watery droppings and white-diarrhoea are not the same, 

 and we must not get the two confused. 



We now change to Ration No. 5 and the watery droppings 

 are not so bad, yet the condition is not so good as if we 

 used Ration No. 7. We are not getting many eggs and, read- 

 ing where some poultrymen force their hens to lay by using 

 a large amount of meat, or, as the experts say, "Run their 

 hens at high pressure' - (misleading terms, since they give 

 the impression that one can force a hen to lay, when the 

 fact is that one cannot do so). We feed six parts of mash 

 to one of meat, using Ration No. S, and try to force them 

 to lay. We "run them at high pressure," and before we 

 know it many of our hens begin to die and some act as 

 though the food were turning them inside out. They eat 



