Cure For Chicken Cholera

I noticed in a recent number of a poultry paper someone deploring the loss of his fowls from cholera. The owner claimed that though apparently well at feeding time at night, fully a fifth of them were dead the next morning; and that after burying these, on his return he found several others dead. At this time a neighbor pronounced the disease cholera and prescribed Venetian red as an effective remedy, saving the remainder of the flock. The neighbor did a good deed and the remedy was excellent; but I want to enter my protest against the diagnosis of the disease. No cholera that I have ever known enters a flock so suddenly and violently, and destroys so many fowls in a night without some previous warning. Neither would a cure have been so quickly and easily effected in case of cholera in so violent a form. The disease in this case was, in my opinion, limber neck, caused from the fowls coming in contact with the decaying carcass of some dead animal and greedily eating the worms with which it was infested. This has often been known to produce such an effect as above stated and in all my many years of experience with poultry I have never known a better remedy for it than Venetian red. To give it to fowls that are unable to eat, it should be given in pills, mixed with a little water, and flour enough to make it stick together, in quantities of about a half teaspoonful three times a day.

Venetian red has proven itself a good remedy in cholera where it has not reached too deep a hold. So also has quinine. If I find a case of cholera among my flock I try as soon as possible to give them all a good dose of Venetian red or quinine two or three times a week until I think the trouble is over. Quinine should be given in doses of about one teaspoonful to a dozen fowls. Quinine and Venetian red are both good, in smaller quantities of course, for young chicks that appear weakly or diseased from almost any cause, except vermin. Where incubators and brooders are used one may easily avert these pests, but if chicks are to be raised with hens, one must ever be on the alert to keep rid of them. It is safest to dust the sitting hen well once a week with good insect powder, giving her another good dusting on removing her with her brood from the nest. This is some trouble but not so much trouble or expense either as losing half of them for want of it. Il you do not use insect powder, be sure on taking them from the nest to grease top of the head and under the throat of each chick and rub a little coal oil on the hen, rubbing it in next to the skin, but beware of using too much oil on the hen or grease on the chicks as greasy chicks are much more susceptible to either cold or heat and will be easily killed in that way when young. I have a vivid recollection of a time in my early experience with chicks of losing about twenty in one day from an over-generous greasing. Another time on finding one of my hens, which had chickens nearly large enough to wean, very much infested with lice I gave her a thorough oiling, literally pouring the coal oil over her. She soon became so intoxicated from the effects of the oil that she realed and fell about like a drunken man. I had to remove her from the coop and the next morning she was dead, looking as though she had been dipped into an oil barrel.

Well this was experience; and, looking back over these and other similar mistakes they seem foolish to me now. But take a girl young as I was then from town, where she had never had any experience whatever in raising chickens and put her out on the farm with a few hens and no poultry literature and she may not do much better. So it is this class and not the experienced poultry raiser to whom I have addressed these few remarks. Every beginner in the poultry business, no matter how few or how many birds he or she expects to handle, should read at least one good poultry paper. You can not expect to do everything you arc advised to do by the different writers but you get many good practical things which will be of service to you.