Chicken Health For Dummies

For Dummies

by Julie Lyn Gauthier, Robert T. Ludlow

Everything you need to care for and keep happy, healthy chickens With directives on diagnosing and treating sick or ailing chickens, as well as general information on how to keep chickens in peak condition, Chicken Health For Dummies is your go-to guide on how to best care for and keep chickens. Inside, you'll get everything you need to know about chicken health and an encyclopedia full of common and not-so-common diseases, injuries, symptoms, and cures that chicken owners may encounter. Chicken Health For Dummies provides chicken owners with one handy, all-encompassing resource. Chicken Health For Dummies joins Raising Chickens For Dummies and Building Chickens Coops For Dummies to round out the For Dummies reference library as a must-have resource for both rural and urban chicken owners.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published December 27, 2012

Reviews

[Sarz · Rating 4 out of 5]

We don't actually have our chickens yet, but this is clearly going to be a bible to their good health once we get set up.

[David Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was Chicken Health For Dummies by Julie Gauthier which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I don't keep chickens but as many of you may have noticed I do sometimes review books on petcare and hobby farming and did review Raising Chickens For Dummies a while back so thought this would be interesting. Actually a lot of the best way to know if there is something wrong with your chickens is to spend time with them and if they have an itch scratch it and throw food and see which ones go for it. Most illnesses you will notice through a change in your chickens behaviour not to mention how rewarding spending time with them is. Chickens can become quite tame and some illnesses like chicken worms you can only hope to minimize as their is no complete cure. This book does go into techniques for doing an autopsy on a chicken although I think usually a vet would do this, there is also euthanasia and one method I quite liked was carbon dioxide where a canister can be connected to an airtight box and chicken can die humanely. It's generally a good idea to keep your chicken's in some kind of enclosure and off the ground to protect them from predators. Some predators like coyotes and foxes will kill your chickens for the fun of it. Males or cockerels are noisy so particularly in urban areas people don't keep them. Most people who keep chickens do so for eggs. Different breeds are suited to egg production, meat or both. You have to watch out for sharp objects as if they are ingested can rip a hens gizzard to pieces and kill it. This is the kind of book you can read all the way through for a good overview and refer to later for specific ailments. Many of the ailments are displayed in table form to make it easier to locate and understand. I did quite enjoy reading this book and think if I lived in the country would be very tempted to keep chickens.

[Matt Kasopsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that this book was very informational! Now I have a better knowledge of what ailments some of my chickens may have in the future. I really liked the little table on page 67 that shows how much bleach is a safe amount to add to you chickens water do it will kill bacteria but not harm the chickens! In my opinion one of the best things about this book is that it isn't written in some complicated format with fancy words that you would need to college degree to understand. It is all basically laymen terms so we can actually understand the words!

overall I really enjoyed the book.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find books for dummies are usually simplistic, but this is very thorough. It is better served as a reference versus reading it straight through. Although I did read chapters/sections discussing what is normal for chickens, anatomy and physiology, medical conditions humans can get from chickens, egg laying, etc. If my chickens were to unfortunately exhibit some problems, this will be the first book I reach for.