Turkeys

Turkeys require more trouble to bring them up than common poultry. The hen will lay till she is five years old. Be sure always to feed themnear the place where you intend they should lay, and feedthem four or five times each day, they being great devourers. While they are sitting they must have plenty of victuals before them, and also be Kept warm. To fatten them, you must give them sodden barley and sodden oats, for the first fortnight, and then cram them as you do capons.

Pigeons

If you keep pigeons, which are generally hurtful to your neighbours, take care to feed them well, or you will lose them all. They are great devourers, and yield but little profit. Their nests should be made private and separate, or they will always disturb one another. Be sure to keep their house clean, and lay among their food some hempseed, of which they are great lovers.

Rabbits

Tame rabbits are very fertile, bringing forth every month; and as soon as they have kindled, put them to the buck, or they will destroy their young. The best food for them is the sweetest hay, oats, and bran, marsh mallows, sowthistle, pars-ley, cabbage-leaves, clover-grass, etc. always fresh. If you do not keep them clean, they will poison both themselves and those that look after them.

Capons

The best way to cram a capon or a turkey is, to take bar-ley meal properly sifted, and mix it with new milk. Make it into a good stiff dough paste ; then make it into long crams or rolls, big in the middle, and small at both ends. Then wetting them in lukewarm milk, give the capon a full gorge three times a day, morning, noon, and night, and in two or three weeks it will be as fat as necessary. In Norfolk, they use ground buck wheat instead of barley meal.

Fowls are very liable to a disorder called the pip, which is a white thin scale growing on the tip of the tongue; and will prevent poultry from feeding. This is easily discerned, and generally proceeds from drinking puddle water, or want of water, or eating filthy meat. This, however, may be cured, by pulling off the scale with your nail, and then rubbing the tongue with salt.

The flux in poultry comes from their eating too much meat, and the cure is to give them peas and bran scalded. If your poultry be much troubled with lice (which is common, proceeding from corrupt food, and other causes), take pepper beaten small, mix it with warm water, wash your poultry with it, and it will kill all kinds of vermin.

Rats And Mice - Bait For

Mix flour of malt with tresh-butter, and add a few drops of oil of aniseed; make into balls, and with them bait the traps. This bait has never been known to fail.

Rats - To Drive Away

Lay birdlime in their haunts, for though nasty in other respects, yet being very curious of their fur, if it be but daubed with birdlime, it will be so troublesome to them, that they will even scratch offthe skin to get it off, and will never stay in a place where they have suffered in such a manner.

Rats And Mice - To Destroy

In or near the place frequented by these vermin, place on a slate or tile one or two table spoonsful of dry oatmeal: lay it thin, and press it flat, more easily to ascertain what is taken away. As the rats, if not interrupted, will come regularly there to feed, continue to supply them with fresh oatmeal for two or three days; and then well mixing,in about six table-spoonsful of dry oatmeal, three drops only of oil of aniseed, feed them with this for two or three days more : afterwards, for one day, give them only half the quantity of this scented oatmeal which they have before actually eaten ; and next day place the following mixture : to four ounces of dry oatmeal, scented with six drops of oil of aniseed, add half an ounce of carbonated barytes, previously pounded very fine in a mortar, and sifted through a little fine muslin or cambric. Mix this intimately with the scented oatmeal; and laying it on the tile or slate, allow the rats to eat it, without the smallest interruption for twenty-four hours; and all those that have eaten any of it will inevitably be killed. The carbonated barytes may be purchased of Brown and Maw, Tavistock Street; Accum, Compton Street; and Allen and Howard, Plough Court, Lombard Street, London.