But wait! There's more!!!
More... ahem... "facts" about chickens according to Nicole Faires.
- "What most people do is feed lots of milk, as much grain as they want, a whole pile of scraps, sprinkle the egg or oyster shells on top and provide a continuous supply of of forage" First of all, MOST people feed their chickens commercially prepared chicken food. I don't feed mine milk, but I do give them yogurt, so I suppose milk would work. I'm suspicious of it as a main food though. The author should also specify what grains she is speaking of. Corn? Mine would completely pig out on corn to the detriment of their health. Yummy corn num nums are like chicken crack. How can that be balanced?
- "Commercial feed probably contains chicken parts ground up labeled as "protein".
- "Chickens can eat peels, sour milk, pickles, meat scraps, rancid lard... they won't eat onions, peppers, cabbage or citrus fruit."
Pickles? Rancid lard? What sort of nutrition will a chicken get from pickles and rancid lard? They can also eat plastic bags and poop, but it's really not good for them. And I hate to tell Miss "I've Never Seen a Real Chicken", but mine will gobble a cabbage right up and they have never met a citrus fruit they didn't like. I give them cabbage year round and some citrus fruit in the winter when egg laying isn't so important.
- Under forcing a molt:
"Keep giving them water, but remove all feed for 10 days." Starve them for a week and a half? Why would I want to starve my chickens? I'm pretty sure my feathers would fall out too if I had no food for 10 days.
- Under preparing to hatch your own eggs: Don't incubate eggs from hybrid or cross breed chickens because the chicks won't be the same. (True, but I love my mutts and you can't beat some barnyard mixes).
"A rooster will be fertile between March and April, but you can make it earlier by extending their light to 14 hours a day and keeping the temperature 60 degrees"[/i]
- "Brooding eggs is keeping them warm like a broody, or mothering hen." (She then goes on to describe a building a brooder out of a cardboard box) I can just see people putting eggs under the 40 watt bulb she suggests for her brooder box and wondering why nothing hatches.
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Under brooding- "Check the chicks 2-3 times per night the first week." Clearly I'm a bad chickie mama. I check on them before lights out and then go to bed myself. I must have dodged a bullet. So far I haven't woken up to chick massacres due to my lack of overnight attention.
"Put burlap bags or cloth rags with no loose threads as floor covering a layer of newspaper for the first week and then when they know what food is, graduate to a think layer of black-and-white shredded newspaper, hay or wood shavings." I can't imagine anything nastier than chicks on cloth. Has this lady never heard of paper towels? And newspaper would get nasty really fast. Plus I wouldn't think the ink would be good for them.
She also gives suggestions on how to cure various chicken illnesses (for cocci give plain vinegar in their drinking water, for mites dip them in sulfer or kerosene, etc.). She never ever mentions that there are commercially prepared options as well. I can just imagine some poor beginner with a cocci outbreak that kills off all their babies while they frantically add more and more vinegar. The one cocci outbreak I had here was only fixed by use of corid in the water. I'm afraid if I had only used vinegar they all would have died. Don't get me wrong. Vinegar in the water is great stuff and I do it as a routine maintenance kind of thing. Why would she not mention that there were some prepared solutions for all of these issues?
The chicken section was fabulously wrong. The rest of the book covers a variety of topics ranging from how to build your own house to herbal cures to the raising of all sorts of animals. It is titled "The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading". There is no mention in there anywhere of her qualifications to be writing such a book. The syntax and flow throughout the book are awkward and she has set most of it up as lists of how to do things. The book is very glossy and professional looking. I need to ask Mom how she found out about it and where she got it. I am VERY curious now. The entire book is suspect to me. Clearly she did very little research on the poultry section. Why would I think she did any more research on the other sections?
