Throughout all times and in all lands the common domestic birds have usually been the special charge of the women and children of a household. In some countries long-established custom makes the poultry the personal property of the wife. A traveler in Nubia about seventy years ago states that there the henhouse, as well as the hens, belonged to the wife, and if a man divorced his wife, as the custom permitted, she took all away with her.
Fig. 21. Silver-Spangled Polish cock and hen. (Photograph from Leontine Lincoln Jr., Fall River, Massachusetts)
The flocks of fowls were usually small in old times. It was only in areas adjacent to large cities that a surplus of poultry or eggs could be disposed of profitably, and as the fowls were almost always allowed the run of the dooryard, the barnyard, and the outbuildings, the number that could be tolerated, even on a large farm, was limited. As a rule the fowls were expected to get their living as they could, but in this they were not so much worse off than other live stock, or than their owners. But, while this was the ordinary state of the family flock of fowls, there were frequent exceptions. The housewife who is thrifty always manages affairs about the house better than the majority of her neighbors, and in older poultry literature there are occasional statements of the methods of those who were most successful with their fowls, which we may well suppose were methods that had been used for centuries.
Fig. 22. Black Langshan cock. (Photograph from Urban Farms, Buffalo, New York)
Modern conditions and methods. About a hundred years ago people in England and America began to give more attention to poultry keeping, and to study how to make poultry (especially fowls) more profitable. This interest in poultry arose partly because of the increasing interest in agricultural matters and partly because eggs and poultry were becoming more important articles of food. Those who studied the situation found that there were two ways of making poultry more profitable. One way, which was open to all, was to give the birds better care; the other was to replace the ordinary fowls with fowls of an improved breed. So those who were much interested began to follow the practices of the most successful poultry keepers that they knew, and to introduce new breeds, and gradually great changes were made in the methods of producing poultry and in the types of fowls that were kept in places where the interest in poultry was marked.
Nearly all farmers now keep quite large flocks of fowls. Many farmers make the most of their living from poultry, and in some places nearly every farm is devoted primarily to the production of eggs and of poultry for the table. Fowls receive most attention, although, as we shall see, some of the largest and most profitable farms are engaged in producing ducks. In the suburbs of cities and in villages all over the land many people keep more fowls now than the average farmer did in old times. These city poultry keepers often give a great deal of time to their fowls and still either lose money on them or make very small wages for the time given to this work, because they try to keep too many in a small space, or to keep more than they have time to care for properly.