Maintaining Your Chickens Health
To increase your chickens health, you should note that prevention is better than cure, just like with other animals. This is because when you take preventative measures, you save a lot of money that would have been used for treatment, you prevent the death of many chickens and you prevent the spread of the disease to other chickens.
One way to increase the health of your chicken is to ensure that the chickens have a chicken run so they can do what they would do in their natural setting. Chickens are more emotionally happy when they are outside scratching the soil for worms and other bugs. Eggs and meat from such animals are also tastier and healthier.
Another way to increase the health of your chicken is to make sure the size of the nesting area is at least 3 to 5 square feet for each chicken and the chicken run 12 to 15 square feet for each chicken. This way, problems such as the coop being damp are eliminated and so the chickens are more comfortable and diseases caused by hot and humid conditions such as Coccidiosis and Botulism are avoided. Highly contagious diseases such as Newcastle disease and Coccidiosis will also spread at a slower rate.
However, the best way to maintain chickens health is to put in place preventative measures. Preventing the disease instead of curing the disease has several advantages. Some of the highly contagious diseases such as Newcastle disease are also very deadly, meaning you may lose all your chicken if there is an outbreak. Preventing diseases has cost benefits because you will avoid huge expenses with vets and medicines and you will avoid having to replace some or most of your chicken. Preventing diseases means if your neighbor’s coop has an infection, you will not be affected.
There are different ways of preventing diseases, but it depends on the disease, the amount you are willing to spend and the availability of things such as creams and medicines. A vaccine can prevent diseases such as Newcastle disease. However, most diseases are prevented by elimination of the factors that cause the disease. For diseases such as Coccidiosis and Botulism can be prevented by keeping the coop dry and clean since they are caused by warm and moist conditions in the coop. Removing decaying animals can also prevent them and plants from the coop and making sure you get rid of droppings often. Giving the hen mineral supplements, especially calcium, can prevent others such as caged layer fatigue.
To guarantee the health of your chicken, it is important to notice the disease on its onset to prevent it from spreading. There are different ways of detecting chicken diseases – it depends on the disease and the equipment you have. Ways of detecting diseases in common diseases are looking at the droppings because droppings from sick chickens are bloody for Coccidiosis, the legs and feet of chickens with scaly leg are rougher than usual, chickens with Mycoplasma infection are always sneezing and coughing and they emit a bad odor and chickens with caged layer fatigue disease are often lazy.
