POULTRY KEEPING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 121, 24 May 1935, Page 14

POULTRY KEEPING.

CLEANLINESS PAYS.

SOME HINTS ON HYGIENE,

(Hy ORPINGTON.)

New Zealand poultry keepers are fortunate in that, along with other stock, tho poultry of this country has escaped epidemics of diseases that have proved devastating elsewhere. Long may it remain so, for there is nothing more disheartening than a good plant wrecked through neglected disease. One disease, principally of young stock, although adults are carriers—coecidiosis —has a more universal hold on poultry yards here than elsewhere, and can devitalise a strain very soon if watch in not maintained. All types of parasites too, both worms and external varieties, seem to thrive well, particularly where there is little frost.

The owners of farm poultry, kept in comparatively small units on fresh free range, can have little to fear iron, disease. These are the perfect conditions for good- health and, provided birds are not bought from weak stock, there should be few casualties. In the highly productive stock it is so necessary "to use in these days of email profits, there is always liable to be a small percentage of ovarian disorders, especially in .spring. Beyond seeing that such birds that suffer from protrusion or prolapsus are not put in the breeding pen if they recover, there is no preventing this when we must push the birds for production.

Stock should not be bought from the market unless for killing immediately, or by an expert who understands the need for quarantine for such purchases. Ponltrymen, on finding disease in their flock, are too apt to send both sick and in-contact birds to the mart, where the novice may buy trouble for himself and his healthy (lock. Since the majority of poultry ailments arc spread by the droppings of affected birds, it is no easy matter to rid sheds or ground of disease once contracted.