Sounds like a pretty good vet you've met, she may be one of those you'll build a great working relationship with for future.
About garlic, I give a clove per hen per day on average, but you may notice in many of my random garlic/kelp-citing posts, I reckon that the greatest benefits only occur when given to hatchlings and for a few generations. I've found the benefits of garlic are lessened when given to birds that have had medicated feed, vaccinations, antibiotics, etc, and I view these bird's abilities to heal with extreme prejudice as in my experience, very little can restore full health to a bird once it's had antibiotics. All my best efforts have given the medicated birds better health than their peers who remain medicated, but they never approach the health of never-medicated birds. If anyone wants to test and see for themselves, it's easy enough to raise one flock without any man-made medication and another with it. I've more or less given up on restoring antibiotic-fed hens. Garlic's usually best for viral attacks as a first line of defense though.
Quote: Sounds to me like you're referring to production breeds. A lot of those have terrible feed consumption to production ratios, they can eat three hen's feeds to produce one hen's muscle or egg quota. Other breeds/strains can produce the same amount from a third of the intake. Breed strain is well worth looking into for that. I'm very wary of purebred anythings. Genetics affect EVERYTHING. (Including how capable your gut is at digesting what it takes in). Also if she referred to all chickens like so, maybe she's got no experience with chickens raised in a more natural system. They can reliably be left to eat as much as they want, they never get too fat. Layer breeds tend to be desperate foodwise as their bodies are bred to be under a huge strain of production, it's akin to the cows they used to breed (but have had to stop breeding) who had udders that touched the floor. It's unkind on the animal, and a false economy.
If you raise a chicken naturally they will cease the pika-style 'candy' seeking. Also once you take them from medicated feeds and put them on more natural food, they'll never go back. Pellets get no love.
That sort of crazy feeding is often due to unnatural feeds in the first place, some other desperate situation rendering the animal unfit to make sensible food choices. It can take a few generations to get them to recognize natural foods again though. I had a clutch of baby turkeys for instance who could not recognize anything other than crumble as food, so starved for their first week! I had to make crumble for them. What's a seed? What's a grain? Only cardboard colored mush is edible, every turkey knows that! They only got that from their dad's side, but how strong a trait...! lol.
What is allowed to be called a complete feed is only justified as such because the animals didn't die outright on it, not because they contain everything for optimal health. They follow a formula to provide the scientifically accepted basics for life, but going by that, you could keep humans on two eggs a day with a bit of kelp occasionally and say it's enough. In the end, the diseases the animals die of were linked to incomplete health rather than old age. It's just like a lot of overweight people actually being malnourished and dying from symptoms related to starvation. If you feed vitamins and minerals in incorrect balance they are not processed properly; correct balance is not what the commercial feed-makers ration it out as, despite how close many of them have gotten, for instance in its natural source sugar is found with iron, which is why when people crave iron they seek sugar instead. The natural sources of vitamins and minerals contain other vitamins, minerals, enzymes, etc which are necessary to properly digest the vitamins and minerals.
That can be negatively impacted by certain breed characteristic insufficiencies for instance if your hen has inherited a partial inability to produce a necessary gut enzyme she won't digest properly so will be eating more to obtain what she should have gotten in the first place. Antibiotics are notoriously (and some permanently) fatal to many gut enzymes, flora and fauna, even in humans, and it's now becoming better documented. If you can't get a healthy digestive tract you can't get health, because to a huge degree health is built from what we consume. The biggest hen I've ever bred lives on a starvation size diet, of her own choice, and the same with the biggest rooster I've ever bred. They just don't need as much. A production red, though, would eat easily quadruple the amount they eat, despite being a third the size physically, and while she' d lay more eggs, I wouldn't keep her because of how much trouble those breeds are health-wise. I'd rather keep two mixbreeds for two eggs a day than one production red for two eggs a day, because they'll be so much healthier, live longer, and eat the same amount or usually less! But of course it's a matter of your particular circumstances and beliefs, and your different environment and the genetics available to you would give you different experiences. We do the best we know with what we have. I'm very much a learner myself, after years of butting heads with the problems I hoped to fix... A few things I've learned, but I've got much to learn yet.
About garlic, I give a clove per hen per day on average, but you may notice in many of my random garlic/kelp-citing posts, I reckon that the greatest benefits only occur when given to hatchlings and for a few generations. I've found the benefits of garlic are lessened when given to birds that have had medicated feed, vaccinations, antibiotics, etc, and I view these bird's abilities to heal with extreme prejudice as in my experience, very little can restore full health to a bird once it's had antibiotics. All my best efforts have given the medicated birds better health than their peers who remain medicated, but they never approach the health of never-medicated birds. If anyone wants to test and see for themselves, it's easy enough to raise one flock without any man-made medication and another with it. I've more or less given up on restoring antibiotic-fed hens. Garlic's usually best for viral attacks as a first line of defense though.
Quote: Sounds to me like you're referring to production breeds. A lot of those have terrible feed consumption to production ratios, they can eat three hen's feeds to produce one hen's muscle or egg quota. Other breeds/strains can produce the same amount from a third of the intake. Breed strain is well worth looking into for that. I'm very wary of purebred anythings. Genetics affect EVERYTHING. (Including how capable your gut is at digesting what it takes in). Also if she referred to all chickens like so, maybe she's got no experience with chickens raised in a more natural system. They can reliably be left to eat as much as they want, they never get too fat. Layer breeds tend to be desperate foodwise as their bodies are bred to be under a huge strain of production, it's akin to the cows they used to breed (but have had to stop breeding) who had udders that touched the floor. It's unkind on the animal, and a false economy.
If you raise a chicken naturally they will cease the pika-style 'candy' seeking. Also once you take them from medicated feeds and put them on more natural food, they'll never go back. Pellets get no love.
That sort of crazy feeding is often due to unnatural feeds in the first place, some other desperate situation rendering the animal unfit to make sensible food choices. It can take a few generations to get them to recognize natural foods again though. I had a clutch of baby turkeys for instance who could not recognize anything other than crumble as food, so starved for their first week! I had to make crumble for them. What's a seed? What's a grain? Only cardboard colored mush is edible, every turkey knows that! They only got that from their dad's side, but how strong a trait...! lol.What is allowed to be called a complete feed is only justified as such because the animals didn't die outright on it, not because they contain everything for optimal health. They follow a formula to provide the scientifically accepted basics for life, but going by that, you could keep humans on two eggs a day with a bit of kelp occasionally and say it's enough. In the end, the diseases the animals die of were linked to incomplete health rather than old age. It's just like a lot of overweight people actually being malnourished and dying from symptoms related to starvation. If you feed vitamins and minerals in incorrect balance they are not processed properly; correct balance is not what the commercial feed-makers ration it out as, despite how close many of them have gotten, for instance in its natural source sugar is found with iron, which is why when people crave iron they seek sugar instead. The natural sources of vitamins and minerals contain other vitamins, minerals, enzymes, etc which are necessary to properly digest the vitamins and minerals.
That can be negatively impacted by certain breed characteristic insufficiencies for instance if your hen has inherited a partial inability to produce a necessary gut enzyme she won't digest properly so will be eating more to obtain what she should have gotten in the first place. Antibiotics are notoriously (and some permanently) fatal to many gut enzymes, flora and fauna, even in humans, and it's now becoming better documented. If you can't get a healthy digestive tract you can't get health, because to a huge degree health is built from what we consume. The biggest hen I've ever bred lives on a starvation size diet, of her own choice, and the same with the biggest rooster I've ever bred. They just don't need as much. A production red, though, would eat easily quadruple the amount they eat, despite being a third the size physically, and while she' d lay more eggs, I wouldn't keep her because of how much trouble those breeds are health-wise. I'd rather keep two mixbreeds for two eggs a day than one production red for two eggs a day, because they'll be so much healthier, live longer, and eat the same amount or usually less! But of course it's a matter of your particular circumstances and beliefs, and your different environment and the genetics available to you would give you different experiences. We do the best we know with what we have. I'm very much a learner myself, after years of butting heads with the problems I hoped to fix... A few things I've learned, but I've got much to learn yet.
