ON A TOWN LOT 17 



CHAPTER II 



THREE "P'S" IN THE POULTRY POD 

 Pleasure, Pep, Profit 

 The Pleasure in Poultry 



I HERE is nothing new about this thought, but unless 

 people have a natural liking for poultry so that they 

 can get real pleasure out of the work — ^because there 

 is a lot of hard work about it ! — they had better not 

 start the business even on a small scale. There in- 

 variably is, of course, a certain pleasure following 

 the accomplishment of profitable work — ^but this kind 

 of pleasure follows after the profit and does not go 

 right along with the work required to earn the profit. 

 Although I now sometimes have as many as five thousand birds at one time 

 on my farm, I never grow tired of these beautiful, active creatures — they 

 have a fascination for me. They should for you, — and I believe they 

 will — if you are to secure a genuine pleasure, taking your loss along with 

 the profit, getting your bumps — not such stiff jolts as I received, I trust 

 — and then profiting by the experience which I set down in this book, 

 as well as your own experience. 



The Backyard Laboratory 



The very best laboratory is one's own poultry yard. You can take 

 the same methods I have used and am using and put them into practical 

 experience in your own "laboratory" every day in the year, and by avoiding 

 many of the pitfalls and eliminating many of the stumbling blocks, 

 your pleasure with poultry will be just that much more increased. 



Making a Profit — Getting Birds With Pep 



In order to make profit from poultry it is very necessary that you 

 secure birds with abundant vitality — aplenty of pep ! A writer on poultry 

 once said that the surest way to secure vitality, vigor and constitution 

 is by the "survival of the fittest" — in other words a process of elimina- 

 tion by means of the ax ! Well, to a certain extent I found that true. As 

 I went more into the commercial end of the poultry business, I saw 

 the imperative necessity of having two attributes in my birds. First, 



