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TO RAISE POULTRY.[1]
Seriously, from early youth I have
taken an especial interest in the subject
of poultry-raising, and so this
membership touches a ready sympathy
in my breast. Even as a schoolboy,
poultry-raising was a study with
me, and I may say without egotism
that as early as the age of seventeen
I was acquainted with all the best and
speediest methods of raising chickens,
from raising them off a roost by
burning lucifer matches under their
noses, down to lifting them off a fence
on a frosty night by insinuating the
end of a warm board under their heels. By the time I was twenty years old, I
poultry than any one individual in all
the section round about there. The
very chickens came to know my talent,
by and by. The youth of both sexes
ceased to paw the earth for worms,
and old roosters that came to crow,
“remained to pray,” when I passed by.
I have had so much experience in
the raising of fowls that I cannot but
think that a few hints from me might
be useful to the Society. The two
methods I have already touched upon
are very simple, and are only used in
the raising of the commonest class of
fowls; one is for summer, the other for
winter. In the one case you start out
with a friend along about eleven
o'clock on a summer's night (not later,
because in some States—especially in
California and Oregon—chickens always
rouse up just at midnight and
crow from ten to thirty minutes,
according to the ease or difficulty they
experience in getting the public waked
up), and your friend carries with him
a sack. Arrived at the hen-roost
(your neighbor's, not your own), you
light a match and hold it under first
one and then another pullet's nose
until they are willing to go into that
bag without making any trouble about it. You then return home, either taking the
I have seen the time when it was eligible and appropriate to leave the sack behind
and walk off with considerable velocity, without ever leaving any word where to
send it.
In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your friend takes
along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you carry a long slender
plank. This is a frosty night, understand. Arrived at the tree, or fence, or other
hen-roost (your own if you are an idiot), you warm the end of your plank in your
friend's fire vessel, and then raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering
chicken's foot. If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly
return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up quarters on the
plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before the fact to his own murder
as to make it a grave question in our minds, as it once was in the mind of Blackstone,
whether he is not really and deliberately committing suicide in the second
degree. [But you enter into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently
—not then].
When you wish to raise a fine, large, donkey-voiced Shanghai rooster, you do it
with a lasso, just as you would a bull. It is because he must be choked, and choked
effectually, too. It is the only good, certain way, for whenever he mentions a
matter which he is cordially interested in, the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred
that he secures somebody else's immediate attention to it too, whether it be day or
night.
The Black Spanish is an exceedingly fine bird and a costly one. Thirty-five
dollars is the usual figure, and fifty a not uncommon price for a specimen. Even
its eggs are worth from a dollar to a dollar and a half a-piece, and yet are so
unwholesome that the city physician seldom or never orders them for the workhouse.
Still I have once or twice procured as high as a dozen at a time for nothing, in the
dark of the moon. The best way to raise the Black Spanish fowl is to go late in
the evening and raise coop and all. The reason I recommend this method is, that
the birds being so valuable, the owners do not permit them to roost around promiscuously,
but put them in a coop as strong as a fire-proof safe, and keep it in the
kitchen at night. The method I speak of is not always a bright and satisfying
you fail on the coop you can generally bring away something else. I brought away
a nice steel trap one night, worth ninety cents.
But what is the use in my pouring out my whole intellect on this subject? I have
shown the Western New York Poultry Society that they have taken to their bosom
a party who is not a spring chicken by any means, but a man who knows all about
poultry, and is just as high up in the most efficient methods of raising it as the
President of the institution himself. I thank these gentlemen for the honorary
membership they have conferred upon me, and shall stand at all times ready and
willing to testify my good feeling and my official zeal by deeds as well as by this
hastily penned advice and information. Whenever they are ready to go to raising
poultry, let them call for me any evening after eleven o'clock, and I shall be on
hand promptly.
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