CHAPTER IV. 



Large Scale Poultry Management. 



The handsome profits which have frequently been published as having been 

 realized from the management of a few fowls, have led to occasional attempts to 

 carry the business into a wider field ; according to the common method of rea- 

 soning that if such a profit can be realized from bo many fowls, a corresponding 

 one should be obtained upon a larger number. Such attempts, however, have 

 generally resulted in failure, even more generally, perhaps, than is commonly 

 supposed, since the starting up of a new industry, when everything connected 

 with it is novel, and while only the gilded estimates of its anticipated profits 

 are to be seen, is likely to excite a very much wider attention than its quiet 

 abandonment, after the unforseen expenses and losses attending its manage- 

 ment have brought disappointment and failure. 



Moreover, some of the most highly gilded descriptions of large poultry farms 

 and their management, have proved, on closer inspection, to have been manu- 

 factured out of the imagination of certain industrious hoaxers. Thus Lewis 

 Wright, in his Practical Poultry Keeper, devotes twenty pages, illustrated with 

 numerous engravings, to the description of a wholesale poultry establishment 

 in France, this description being a "translation from, an interesting work pub- 

 lished under the authority of the French Minister of Agriculture," and telling 

 of a certain Baroness de Linas, a widow, who, "partly for amusement, and part- 

 ly in order to augment a rather scant income, turns her attention to poultry, and 

 has for some time succeeded in both objects." This establishment, "situated at 

 Charny, a village near Paris," was said to accommodate twelve hundred laying 

 hens, with their broods; and Mr. Wright's description of it is said to have in- 

 duced persons to cross the Atlantic for the purpose of visiting it, only to find 

 that no such place as Chai'ny was known in the neighborhood of Paris, and 

 that the great poultry establishment of Madame de linas existed only in imag- 

 ination. 



A similar hoax was the story of the mammoth poultry' establishment, of M. 

 de Sora, also near Paris, in which twenty-two superannuated and damaged horses 

 were daily slaughtered and cut up into mincemeat, for the benefit of a hundred 

 thousand hens, that, under this regimen, laid three hundred eggs each per an- 

 num. This story was widely copied, even journals of such information and re- 

 spectability as the Mark Lane Express being duped by it; but when th^ attempt 

 was made to find M. de Sora's establishment it vanished into thin air. 



Similar stories have had their origin on this side of the ocean, having not 

 only poultry, but other industries for their object; now it may be a poultry 

 farm in the east ; to-morrow a frog farm in Wisconsin; next week a turtle farm 

 in Alabama, etc., etc, 



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