In celebration of the collection of very old Smallholder Magazines in our office, we thought we'd offer you a throwback to our advice back in June, 1934.
Our cover feature from Saturday, June 23, 1934's edition advises the poultry keeper to: judge your pullets by their heads.
It goes on to offer the following advice:
The head offers better guidance as to a bird's abilities than any other part of the body.
You can invariably write down as a poor layer a pullet whose head is "gable shaped," with a fat face and coarse wattles and ear lobes (image 1).
Similarly, a bird with an excessively flat head, a good deal longer than it is deep (image 2), almost certainly has not paid for her keep, let alone earned a profit.
A pearly-greyish look about the eyes (image 3) points to a predisposition to the dread disease Fowl Paralysis.
The head that marks the pullet of real worth is one which is nicely round and equipped with large, full-open eyes, a stout, short beak, thin wattles, fine, soft lobes and large nostrils (image 4).
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