This is a good thread! If the birds have a good balanced diet for their age, any individual who needs additional nutrients of any sort IS NOT parent material! Some younglings have genetic issues that cause them to need more than normal care/ suppliments/ etc; they are not worth adding to the breeding flock. Survival with extra care is fine; reproducing the problem in the flock is a really bad idea. Mary
It's a good point, that animals requiring TLC are generally not breeder material, but there's a lot of grey areas there, especially because it can be very hard to determine why an animal is not coping on the same diet others are.
I'm not actually disagreeing with you nor trying to 'shoot down' what you said at all, just trying to illustrate some of those grey areas.
Some very commonly used (and over-used) artificial fertilizers can prevent uptake of certain vital nutrients by up to 100%; when the farms you're getting their grains (etc) from have repeatedly used those artificial fertilizers, the nutrient level or availability often drops correspondingly and so your chooks can literally be malnourished on what was once a 'balanced/ complete diet', despite testing showing the nutrient levels. They may be there, but unavailable. It's no use putting more and more nutrients into the soil when they're 'bound' there and don't make it into the plants in available form. Those plants aren't truly nourishing for any sort of creature that eats them. Also, despite some claims about synthetic nutrients, they do not act the same in either the soil, the plant, or the end consumer of the plant products. Some individuals do better on synthetic nutrients than others, who have intolerance for it. By the same token some individuals have intolerance for more natural diets.
Since many nutrient deficits take years to show, even decades, the issues may only be revealed beyond the average cull-by date, or in the offspring of the affected individual. (As the number of deficiency-caused spraddled chicks shows, for one example. When they're hatching spraddled, it's a maternal issue). Some issues can take generations to show, particularly those caused by certain chemical exposures and genetic damages due to such events. You can be blaming yourself or your birds for something which happened to ancestors of those birds which you've never even met.
A slight overdose or underdose of any nutrients, synthetic or natural, affects other nutrients since they are processed in conjunction with one another, and used in the body in conjunction as well. A slight overdose of something in the diet can lead to your birds showing deficiency issues and for all you'd know, it could have just been due to an untraceable error somewhere in the feed's background, not due to any fault in the birds.
On premixed diets they can't naturally compensate for any of this, they just have to put up with it and try to cope.
Also, a lot of things can happen to an animal which can cause it to require some TLC for no fault of its own; almost all of those things are human faults, not the animals' and not due to random chance either. I've bred animals whose lives depended on extra care at some point or another and found their offspring are fine, even sometimes superior for the hardship their parents experienced, both physically and mentally.
That said, if you have a flock which cannot cope on the diet it's on, and it's a long term problem, looking into more info on nutrition and breed tendencies is probably necessary... Some breeds commonly fail to cope on normal diets.
Best wishes.
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