Friday, May 25, 2012

Humans - the strangest of the animal species.


It is OK if we spend our lives on the twentieth floor of an apartment block with a view of the twentieth floor of the next apartment block. We need never leave our happy abode and can get food delivered daily, water is on tap and waste disposal is only a flush away.
Such a life is regarded as successful by many and often completely satisfying by those that live it. No need to partake in the daily grind of hunter gatherer. To spend your waking hours defending your right to survival from aggressive neighbors. Life is bliss - boringly blissful but definitely very popular compared to the alternative.

The humble chicken like the wolf that has been turned into a domestic pet must now take on the idiosyncrasies of the human species with our romantic ideas of chickens running around in fields of grass, laying eggs when the mood is upon them, cuddling up to their fluffy neighbors, pooping happily in the grass to fertilize next weeks growth of weeds and generally having a Disney good time.

 Who said " Those who can't learn from the mistakes of the past are bound to repeat them"?  He must have been through the cycle himself to come up with such a profound observation.  These few paragraphs of observations some personal and some borrowed from others are an expression of frustration at seeing a generation of city dwellers cut off from rural experiences determined to relearn the lessons of the last generation of poultry producers.

FOWL CHOLERA on the rise

Fowl cholera or Pasteurella multicida is a bacterial disease that thrives in unsanitary conditions and can survive in soil to reinfect avian species. It causes chronic pain and suffering in the chicken with possible death. Fowl cholera can be spread by rodents and possibly by feral cats and pigs.
Caged hens are relatively easy to keep clean and they don't have access to soil.  Should a hen become infected then disease spread through the shed should be slow as each hen has limited access to the rest of the flock unlike a large free flock where there is the possibility for rapid spread of any bacterial infection.
New vaccinations are available that can provide some protection.

The best protection in my opinion is to keep the hens off the ground, clean out the shed between each batch and have a rodent control plan in place. 

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Caged Hens and Bird Flu

Fortunately we in Australia are unlikely to suffer an outbreak of the dreaded H5N1 strain of the Asian Bird Flu.  This is because the migrating flocks of water birds which can carry the virus from say Indonesia will probably not survive the flight over.  Should a bird survive the trip it would need to infect the local populations which don't migrate and then the virus would need to be transferred to a commercial or backyard flock of chickens before we would have noticeable mortalities.
Its a sad fact that free range chickens are the most likely of the production systems to be the first to be infected.  Water birds especially ducks can carry the virus  and they are attracted to any  standing pools of water in the free range exercise area.  The duck poops in the water - the chicken drinks the water and the whole flock quickly becomes infected.
Another infection route is when egg or chicken meat producers draw water direct from a dam or river and supply it to their flocks without disinfecting it first.  To obtain quality certification producers need to have an effective disinfection system in place and it must be maintained.  These regulations don't apply to the neighbor who keeps a few chooks for eggs for himself and a few friends.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Cage Eggs and Stick Fast Fleas

Ah! The good old days.
The days of chickens in the backyard.  The idyllic picture of a group of hens eating  food scraps and rewarding us with a couple of eggs a day.  Along comes the stick fast flea to bring us back to reality with a jolt.  As a child we had the chooks which worked fine until we introduced an infected hen from a kind neighbor, got the stick fast, spent hours and hours trying to eradicate them, finally giving up and getting rid of the chooks.  That was in the days before  exotic chemicals came along as a "miracle cure". Now those exotic chemicals we used with gay abandon have been banned.  The best recommended cure is concrete floors for night time perching to break the life cycle of night time laying of stick fast eggs onto soil and the larvae living in the soil until it's time to pupate, hatch out and start all over again.

Of course there is no guarantee with any cure in a backyard setting.  One only needs to miss two live fleas or a few eggs and stick fasts lay thousands for the little beggars to come back to bite you.

The stick fast sucks the hens blood and can cause death in chickens.  Keeping a hen in a modern cage system where the manure is removed at least weekly using belts ensures the hen never suffers from the irritation and loss of blood that stick fast fleas can inflict.