Aggressive cock

If the cock scuffles

Aggressiveness of the cock can be caused by different reasons. For example, by the lack of the space given for the birds. Then the cock accepts the intrusion of other birds as an encroachment upon its territory. The cock can even display aggressiveness because of the changes in its master's clothes. Catching of hens, their loud clucking or taking eggs out of nests in its presence also makes it nervous and agitates it.

The violation of the correlation between the amount of cocks and hens often becomes the reason for aggressiveness. The proportion of 1:10 can be considered normal.

For two or three days a pugnacious cock can be kept on a hunger diet in a darkened place, having provided the cock with the free access to water. Some people also cut the upper part of the beak and heels. 5-6 hours before the operation the cock should not have any feed. One third of the beak is to be cut. The operation is carried out carefully so as not to injure the tongue. The wound is cauterized with burning hot metal, tincture of iodine or manganese concentrated solution. If within 2 or 3 hours the wound continues to bleed, it is again treated with iodine or manganese solution.

Ration of hens

When you apply the combined, or wet, type of feeding for hens of egg breeds, you use the following rations (see the table) . The day dose of grain and flour feed for hens of meat and egg breeds is increased by 18-20 g and the day dose of animal feed is increased by 3-4 g.

Grain can be substituted by boiled potatoes. However, hens should not be overfed by potatoes as they fatten and reduce their egg-laying qualities. In autumn hens are fed according to the spring ration taking into account receiving not less than 15 eggs from a layer. Cabbage leaves, carrots and beet tops and leafy tops of other root vegetables are used instead of ensilage and hay.

Monthly egg-laying qualities:

Day length

Make the day longer.

The most important comfort for birds is the light. Hens need not less than 14 daylight hours. A winter day is much shorter. Make it longer turning on the electric lighting for the period of 5-6 hours so that the total amount of daylight hours made 14-16 hours per day and night. Unfortunately, many poultry farmers often underestimate this condition. This is why in cloudy period their hens are depressed and don't lay eggs.

Delay in laying eggs.

If eggs are delayed, at this, irregardless of its age, the bird stays in its nest for a long time, becomes sluggish, loses its appetite, its stomach increases, palpation becomes painful. The ill bird gets vitelline peritonitis not only with inflammation and disruptions of vitelline hoses, but also with inflammation of ovary, oviduct, mucous coat of cloaca. It leads to delay of the formed eggs, their putrescence under the influence of microflora which creates the unpleasant smell and, as a result, leads to intoxication and the bird's death.

The causes of the disease are inadequate feeding and the violation of the technology of growing. Inflammatory processes in the bird's organism appear as a result of the shortage of vitamins À and Å. The bird's food should include: herbal flour, carrots, root, green fodder. The disease also appears because of birds' congestion, the ammonia contamination of the poultry-house, lack of motion (the bird's stay in the fresh air), birds' fright, high positioning of roosts and nests.

A weak bird easily gets infectious diseases among which pullorosis (fowl typhoid), salmonellosis, anaerobic infection can be. They can only be diagnosed by the laboratory research of affected reproductive organs and by the determination of specific pathogens.

The specialist's comment

This proposition can be considered efficient and useful. As this disease is caused by the ticks parasitizing under the corneal layer, the treatment of the bird's affected legs with warmed up sunflower-seed oil and fats during one or two weeks leads to the desquamation of keratinized bumps and to breathlessness of ticks.

At the same time it should be taken into account that ticks parasitize not only on the open parts of the bird's body, but in feathers, too. This is why the ill bird should have complex treatment.