Preventing Disease

By Edward T. Mallinson.

No other consideration is more central than disease prevention for a healthy, satisfying flock of commercial, semi-commercial, hobby or pet birds of any type.

Disease prevention focuses primarily on dedicated planning and sound management practices that keep infectious diseases out in the first place and stops noninfectious diseases before they start. With this approach, you place a higher priority on planning and expenditures for disease prevention than on short-term savings and stopgap treatments.

It is more than a list of long- and short-range health protection and preservation practices. It is essentially a mental attitude that recognizes the ever-present risk of disease and the fact that disease prevention doesn't cost; it pays and many times over.

Failure to concentrate first on planned disease prevention often leads to personal disappointment and sometimes disastrous financial loss. In contrast, a flock with good health security management is a delight, and a source of both pride and profit.

Basic Areas

This type of management encompasses seven basic considerations: Confinement, proper nutrition, top quality replacements, isolation and segregation, cleanout and cleanup, stress management, and well-reasoned medication.

Confinement. Regardless of the size of a flock, its health is most secure when it is confined to a fenced-in pen at least, and preferably to a fully enclosed shelter. Poultry allowed to run loose as scavengers often have a diet insufficient to maintain peak growth and performance. Far fewer eggs are produced and they frequently may be lost, stolen or broken. Stray poultry become exposed to diseases in wild birds and neighboring flocks, bringing disease back home and to other farms.

Confinement further protects poultry and other birds from weather extremes, dogs, cats and many other predators. But most importantly it puts you in control of what your flock eats, the second priority in disease prevention.

Nutrition.

A commercial poultry ration is a miracle of modern research and manufacturing. Today's poultry mashes and pellets are nutritionally complete with proper balances of essential proteins, grains, vitamins and minerals for outstanding growth, health and productivity. Similar excellent commercially produced feeds are gradually becoming available to keepers of caged or other exotic birds. Commercial feeds should always be fed according to manufacturers' instructions.

Do not be misled by the cheapness or attractiveness of grains or old-time practices, or throwing birds some "scratch feed" and letting them fend for themselves. Commercial feeds provide your birds with their best opportunity to build a constitution that will resist infection and achieve inherited capacities for extraordinary performance. But if you must feed grains, be sure to provide grit.

Water, Vitamins

An ample, cool, clean, regularly available supply of drinking water also is a key part of proper nutrition, protecting the sensitive function of the avian kidney and its water-balance mechanisms. Scant, dirty or warm water often leads to low water consumption, poor feed utilization, metabolic stress and kidney failure.

Generally, 1- to 21-day-old fowl benefit from vitamins added to their drinking water. Commercial vitamin supplements that can be added to the drinking water are available from most feed suppliers.

Quality Replacements. Birds with inherited capacities for top growth and productivity are available to the owners of small poultry flocks from hatcheries, dealers and pullet suppliers participating in the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP).