Ways in keeping your chickens healthy. Chickens are surprisingly health animals, and they are among the top birds with remarkable health. When they receive proper care, chickens rarely get sick. Some chicken farmers keep their flock for many years, plus in all that time. It is infrequent for one of the birds to die out of illness. Still, this does not make them susceptible to certain diseases. There are aggressive infections that wreak havoc to your flock.
The key to keeping chickens healthy and live a long, fulfilling life is to provide them with a clean place to live in, providing them with highly nutritious food as well as regular freshwater. In this article, we are going to look at some of the ways that can help maintain your flock’s health and keep disease to a minimum. Let’s dive in, shall we?
How to Sustain a Healthy Flock
Crowding in a specific place is a sure recipe for disaster, and yes, for chickens, crowding them together in an area that is moist and dirty is another way of attracting disease to your flock. The following is easy to develop a list of keeping your chickens healthy as well as maintaining their productivity:
Provide Ample Space
Chicken farmers who practice birds rearing in their backyard usually have small coops. And in these small coops, these farmers are often tempted to crowd as many birds as they could together. Overcrowding among chickens encourages cannibalistic behavior, frequent fights, lousy odor, egg-eating, and disease. Chickens should be provided with enough room to roam around.
Large chicken breeds require ample space of not less than four square feet of space for each bird, and for the light chicken breeds, the same applies, but a small allowance can be allowed. Still, more space for your birds will particularly helpful in keeping chickens healthy. Also, allowing your birds’ frequent outdoor runs provides them with fresh air, good sunshine, and will enable them to fluff up and clean their feathers.
Read my article on the best chicken breed for pets.
Maintain a clean and dry environment
Ensure that your chickens’ coop is dry. Wet litter is accompanied by rapidly multiplying bacteria due to the dampness. This dampness can be caused by a leaking roof, or a tilted over waterer. You should, with immediate effect, remove the wet litter and use dry wood chips in the coop’s floor as this will provide a clean and sterile environment. Ensure that the roof is fixed of any holes and for the waterer, secure it firmly to avoid frequent tilting.
Feed your Chickens properly
Ensure that your flock is getting enough fresh and nutritious feed. Feed your chickens commercial rations that are healthy, and when they supplement this diet with bugs and worms they find in the run, they will surely maintain their health.
Prevent Diseases
Preventing diseases from your flock will help in minimizing the occurrence of outbreaks. The advantage of a backyard flock is that they have protection since they are mostly isolated. This is particularly important because microbes will have a hard time spreading from one flock to another unless they are transmitted by humans to the chickens.
Here are some basic things to consider to minimize the spread of germs in your backyard and keeping chickens healthy:
Tips
- When you are buying chicks, make sure that it is from an approved hatchery. Also, ensure that the breeding flock, as well as the chicks, are free of any disease that might be infectious.
- Take maximum caution when adding new chickens to an existing flock. Microbes find it easy to infect healthy chickens, joyriding on chicken. It is a common temptation for backyard chicken owners to add on their numbers by bringing a bird or two. You need to make sure that the bird id forms a flock that has no experience whatsoever of diseases are clean. You can place the newcomers in quarantine for about a month to observe them if they carry a potential illness.
- After visiting another flock or the poultry show, make sure that you change clothes and shoes before attending to your own flock. This is because dirt formed these clothes, and shoed can bring about disease. Visitors who come into contact with your birds should also practice proper sanitation.
- Ensure regular cleaning of your chicken’s feeders and waterers
- Vaccinate your flock regularly. Vaccinate the chicks, which will help prevent a couple of common diseases. Use medicated chick feed as this will help reduce common conditions such as coccidiosis.
- Do not expose your chickens to wild birds or rodents that may be carriers of harmful pathogens.
When your flock is kept healthy in clean coops, feed on nutritious food, and are held in isolation away from the disease, it is unlikely that you will ever get sick. Your flock will enjoy a very productive and healthy life.
Conclusion
Chickens are surprisingly health animals, and they are among the top birds with remarkable health. Crowding in a particular place is a sure recipe for disaster, and indeed, for chickens, crowding them together in an area that is moist and dirty is another way of attracting disease to your flock. Overcrowding among chickens encourages cannibalistic behavior, frequent fights, lousy odor, egg-eating, and condition.
Chickens should be provided with enough room to roam around. Ensure that your chickens’ coop is dry and that the roof is fixed of any holes, and for the waterer, secure it firmly to avoid frequent tilting. To keep your chickens healthy, ensure that your flock is getting enough fresh and nutritious feed. The advantage of a backyard flock is that they have protection since they are mostly isolated. This is particularly important because microbes will have a hard time spreading from one flock to another unless they are transmitted by humans to the chickens. Your flock should now be guaranteed when it comes to their health since now you know what to do to ensure that your chickens remain healthy constantly.
Read my other post on DIY chicken coop.
