Publicly, or Privately?
What we have here on BYC, on the FB forums, Youtube, etc, are anecdotes, not data - and even were we to amalgamate all those anecdotes together, into something looking like a data set, as CHICKEN's example shows, some of those anecdotes are being widely repeated - they aren't new data points, likely skewing any conclusions one might draw from that set.
Now can we trust our own memory. After all, you are on record saying
chickentrains said:
Every person who has documented their trip to
TSC thus far has reported pasty butt in one or more of the chickens. Wouldn't you agree thats a problem?
and yet, not even every poster in this thread claiming first hand experience mentioned pasty butt>
Birds are fine -
Also Birds are fine -
I think this is chicks are fine (can be read multiple ways, unsure if there is an actual visit this year)-
Chicks are warm and fine
Birds are dying (cause not suggested)-
Repeating themselves (still no pasty butt) -
Its Operator error (and they are still using the stock tanks, though not where you can see them - but no mention of pasty butt)
(that's just the first three pages, you are welcome to check my work - they don't support your claims)
and again
chickentrains said:
Every person who has documented their trip to
TSC thus far has reported pasty butt in one or more of the chickens. Wouldn't you agree thats a problem?
"in one or more chickens" suggests comparison to a state in which no pasty butt was observed - yet prior posters, in this thread,
have reported pasty butt in the prior stock tanks, too. (and while I didn't, as irrelevant to the discussion, I bought all my birds from TSC last year, in several waves. Half the batches had one or two pasty butt issues, half did not - all were from stock tanks)
Based on a search of this thread, those were the FIRST mentions of pasty butt, on page 18 - which puts your assertion and hypothesis on shaky ground.
Even setting side the "difficulties" with the data points, correlation is not causation. There is no evidence that the new brooders are the cause of pasty butt, nor much offered in the way of a plausible mechanism for the new brooders to cause pasty butt. There are claims that the new brooders, even where they are being used, aren't being used exclusively (stock tanks for "holding" in the back, linked above).
Many believe pasty butt to be a sign of stress in the birds, and yes, plausibly, these "new" brooders, though used commercially for years, *might* be a cause of stress, particularly where they are operated by untrained and/or uncaring employees (as mentioned by several posters in this thread). But that's hardly the only cause of stress this year - all these chicks were taken directly after hatch and shipped around the country by USPS, who is having problems of their own that might reasonably contribute to chicken's stress -
so much so that legislators have proposed laws BANNING the shipment of live animals by USPS in their state in response.
I hope this rather practical example has done more than simply waste my time, and has illustrated, in part, just a few of the errors of statistical analysis implicit in the earlier comment. It does *suggest* a bias re: the topic of brooders in the framing of the above question, I leave that exercise to you to continue.
