Milly wrote:Is it important to buy vaccinated hens then or do people not usually
Sorry for all the questions, it must be the nurse in me that made me look into it.
In principle hens kept free range in small numbers in backyards usually avoid many of the dangers that are faced every day by hens raised under intensive conditions on large commercial poultry farms.
Maintaining the health of small numbers also needs people to use the basic principles that make up the disease control programs of the intensive farming system so....isolation, quarantine - that's where backyard chicken keepers tend to stop where intensive farms go on with .....single aged farms (so battery farms clear out the sheds and restock with hens of the same age) and comprehensive disinfection and vaccination programs.
Backyard keepers can disinfect from time to time but it's rarely as part of a "program" if you know what I mean...it's a bit more ad hoc. I think most backyard keepers, whilst they buy hens that have been vaccinated (and they may not know if they are or not), don't have a vaccination program so after a year or so those hens are technically unprotected anyway....and given (as Dom said) that vaccines generally come in large dose numbers
they don't normally follow through.
