When fall is coming on you must be very careful of the pullets. As I said before, they are much more subject to blackhead than are the toms. When I house them up,—that is, in large houses, say forty or fifty to one pen, I have my prepared feed for turkeys (Margaret Mahaney’s Turkey Feed) before the pullets all the time. The less corn you give any turkey hen the less trouble you will have from blackhead, for corn is heating. To keep the pullets in good condition you will find all the ingredients in this prepared feed, which is put up and sold now by The Park & Pollard Company, 46 Canal Street, Boston, under the name of Margaret Mahaney’s Turkey Feed.
Give more or less whole corn to the toms if you want to get them in good condition for shipping or for dressing around Thanksgiving. They do not fatten up as quickly as the turkey hen, which is the reason I keep all corn and corn meal away from the turkey hens.
Put one-half teaspoonful of salicylate of soda in the drinking water in each pan at night. In the mornings give them fresh water and twice a week place in it a little tincture of iron (4 drops to each gallon of water). Do this up to about January, and then, if your turkey hens are kept warm and comfortable, they are over the dangers of the blackhead season.
Give the same treatment to the young toms.
INVESTIGATION OF DISEASES
“What is the disease?” is the first and most important question to ask. The number of people who fatefully assume from the beginning that the answer to this question is beyond their reach is inexcusably large. If the non-professional reader would apply even a limited amount of study and common sense many of the lesser ills might be avoided, and many others successfully treated. A little special instruction is here given to enable one to detect a disease before it is too late, and thus, in a great measure, to avoid those disheartening ravages which, at times, come upon the uninformed owner of turkeys.
The small number of diseases which are liable to be confused makes it comparatively easy to form the right conclusion by eliminating from the possible list those that do not show the particular symptoms of the other diseases.
A general knowledge of the organism, habits, and appearance of turkeys when in health is, of course, very desirable. A reasonably close observation is about all we can expect in this matter from the ordinary owner of a large flock of turkeys. The experienced fancier adds to this a frequent handling and more detailed study to learn the normal hardness and suppleness of the flesh and the warmth, moisture and color of the skin, especially about the vent, and the outline and structure of the skeleton. It is also eminently desirable that one know what is a right condition of all the organs, but this is particularly true in respect to the liver and other digestive organs.
One of the most common mistakes in the discovery of a disease is the forming of a decision after too little study. Finding one or two symptoms which are known to attend a suspected ailment, one is prone to jump at the conclusion that he has detected the real difficulty, when a further investigation would reveal other symptoms, which, in conjunction with these, would lead to the true conclusion. Every examination, therefore, should be thorough until a degree of certainty is felt. It is essential, too, that the raiser not expect that the disease will invariably present just the symptoms mentioned in any book, for they will vary more or less in different turkeys, and even in the same one at different times,—a caution which merely calls for the exercise of judgment and common sense.