Poultry: A Practical Guide to the Choice, Breeding, Rearing, and Management of all Descriptions of Fowls, Turkeys, Guinea-fowls, Ducks, and Geese, for Profit and Exhibition.Piper, Hugh
Science
Poultry: A Practical Guide to the Choice, Breeding, Rearing, and Management of all Descriptions of Fowls, Turkeys, Guinea-fowls, Ducks, and Geese, for Profit and Exhibition.
Piper, Hugh
Poultry -- Breeding
If "cramming" is practised it should be done in the following manner:
The feeder, usually a female, should take the fowl carefully out of the
fatting-coop by placing both her hands gently under its breast, then sit
down with the bird upon her lap, its rump under her left arm, open its
mouth with the finger and thumb of the left hand, take the pellet with
the right, dip it well into water, milk, or pot liquor, shake the
superfluous moisture from it, put it into the mouth, "cram" it gently
into the gullet with her forefinger, then close the beak and gently
assist it down into the crop with the forefinger and thumb, without
breaking the pellet, and taking great care not to pinch the throat. When
the fowl has been "crammed" it should be carefully carried back to its
coop, both hands being placed under its breast as before. Chickens
should be "crammed" regularly every twelve hours. The "cramming" should
commence with a few pellets, and the number be gradually increased at
each meal until it amounts to about fifteen. But always before you begin
to feed gently feel the fowl's crop to ascertain that the preceding meal
has been digested, and if you find it to contain food, let the bird wait
until it is all digested, and give it fewer pellets at the next meal. If
the "crams" should become hardened in the crop, some lukewarm water must
be given to the bird, or poured down its throat if disinclined to
drink, and the crop be gently pressed with the fingers until the
hardened mass has become loosened so that the gizzard can grind it.
The food chiefly used in France for "cramming" fowls is buckwheat-meal
bolted very fine and mixed with milk. It should be prepared in the
following manner: Pour the milk, which should be lukewarm in winter,
into a hole made in the heap of meal, mixing it up with a wooden spoon a
little at a time as long as the meal will take up the milk, and make it
into the consistency of dough, keep kneading it until it will not stick
to the hands, then divide it into pieces twice as large as an egg, which
form into rolls generally about as thick as a small finger, but more or
less thick according to the size of the fowls to be fed, and divide the
rolls into pellets about two and a half inches in length by a slanting
cut, which leaves pointed ends, that are easier to "cram" the fowls with
than if they were square. The pellets should be rolled up as dry as
possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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