We swore we wouldn’t get emotionally attached to the chickens. They weren’t going to be like the cat: they would be working animals that lived in the garden and gave us eggs every morning. We were told never to take them to the vet when we bought them (from a vet); instead, you should let them get on with life, and if they fell ill and died, just replace them.
Well it hasn’t quite worked out like that. They do live in the garden and we do eat their eggs, but they got names on day one, we can separate them by personality and we’ve even got a favourite.
Even so, we’re determined not to spend a fortune on unnecessary vet bills, and so have diagnosed and treated the few ailments we’ve encountered so far ourselves. That’s where a book like The Chicken Health Handbook should come in handy. As Damerow writes in her introduction:
This book was born out of years of frustration in trying to deal with chicken diseases and not being able to find a clearly understandable, in-depth source of information.
So when she sat down to write it she was clearly coming from the same angle as the rest of us. Except while she covered off the ‘in-depth’ bit with aplomb, the ‘clearly understandable’ bit got forgotten.
Our chickens started to sneeze and got runny noses soon after we got them. That can be caused by anything from stress to a common cold so isn’t entirely unusual. Yet there’s nothing in the index about ‘sneezing’, or ‘runny nose’. Instead, it uses technical terms and the proper names of diseases, relying on you to know what it is your chickens have got before you can read the diagnosis.
This is a shame, as within the body of the book there are excellent tables that help you identify problems in your flock from the way their droppings look, changes in their eggs or the way they’re moving. Shift these into the index and expand on them and this would be a first-class resource.
It contains everything you could possibly want to know about diagnosing your chickens’ health problems and performing an autopsy should the worst occur but it’s just not easy to navigate.
So instead we turned to the net to diagnose our chooks’ sneezes, and treated them with citricidal and apple cider vinegar. Together they did the trick quite nicely, without the help of this book.
Rating 
Price: £15.99
ISBN: 0882666118
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