We really had mixed feelings about The Chicken Health Handbook by Gail Damerow. Considered by many to be the best chicken book on the market, we found that many of the suggestions in the book directly contribute to animal suffering. The humble chicken has to be the most maligned creature on the planet and the entire chicken industry continues to thrive on the belief that chickens are worthless and dispensable.
However, The Chicken Health Handbook seems to walk a fine line. Clearly author Gail Damerow cares about chickens and writes numerous books about their health and well-being. Yet many of the “treatments” or “solutions” in the book represent a disregard for the chicken’s well-being, including (but not limited to): de-beaking to prevent fighting and cannibalism, embryo dyeing (injecting dye into eggs prior to hatching to color-identify different matings) and toe punching (cutting the webbing between newly hatched chicks to identify their various matings).
Although we hesitated to recommend this book because of the disregard for chicken suffering sometimes evidenced in the text, yet The Chicken Health Handbook does serve as a valuable diagnostic tool for helping sort out health problems with backyard flocks. If you need a list of every possible chicken illness or disease, and all their symptoms, then The Chicken Health Handbook is the guide for you. In fact, The Chicken Health Handbook is the definitive guide to chicken care, just don’t look at it as the be-all-end-all guide to organic chicken health.
Order this book on Amazon.com The Chicken Health Handbook
Visit: http://www.storey.com/
Publisher: Storey Publishing
344 Pages
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