Practical Methods for Disease Prevention in Meat Pigeon Farming

On how to raise pigeons well, especially meat pigeons, I think identifying, treating and preventing diseases is extremely important. Below I will explain the common diseases of pigeons, purely hand-typed; if there is anything incorrect, please leave your valuable suggestions.

1. Common pigeons have diarrhea with no warning signs and no other symptoms: 1 gram of oxytetracycline mixed into 2 jin of water; if there is inflammation, add 1 gram of amoxicillin.

2. If pigeons show watery diarrhea, vomiting symptoms, and yellow-green or yellow droppings, you should consider it to be adenovirus. If secondary E. coli occurs, the condition worsens, deaths increase, and they pass green, foul-smelling loose droppings, become emaciated, severely dehydrated, and die of exhaustion. If it is only individual pigeons, isolate them and fast them for three days while keeping water available; if many are infected, fast the whole loft for three days while keeping water available. The antiviral drug ribavirin can treat it, and after recovery they gain lifelong immunity.

3. Yellow-white patches appear in the pigeon's mouth, the bird is depressed, the feathers are puffed up, and damage to the mouth causes difficulty swallowing and breathing, decreased appetite or no eating, thirst with frequent drinking, yellow-green loose droppings, coughing, and obvious respiratory rales can be heard, emaciation; young pigeons may die within a few days. The visceral type and umbilical type are uncommon. Human metronidazole can treat it, one quarter tablet.

4. The pigeon shows depression, ruffled feathers, decreased appetite or no eating, ataxia, unsteady gait, easy falling, anemia and emaciation, difficulty breathing, diarrhea, gray-white loose droppings; a few develop conjunctivitis, and severe cases may show blindness and head tilting, tremors, paroxysmal spasms, opisthotonos and other neurological symptoms, and finally die of exhaustion. Chronic cases generally have no obvious symptoms; do regular deworming. Sulfonamide drugs, with the first dose doubled, used for three consecutive days, stopped for two days, then administered again for three days, and it can be cured.

5. The pigeon shows listlessness, reduced appetite, a marked increase in water intake, ataxia, weakness and paralysis of both legs. Difficulty breathing, stretching the neck to breathe, crop dilation and fullness filled with fluid, mucus-like discharge from the mouth and nose, watery diarrhea, and finally death from collapse and suffocation. This is salt poisoning. Once it occurs, immediately stop using health sand with a high salt content, and at the same time give plenty of fresh, clean drinking water to help dilute the salt in the body and speed up its excretion. For severe cases, drinking water must be controlled, allowing drinking for ten to twenty minutes each hour, to avoid worsening deaths.

These are the common minor ailments in meat pigeon farming. Some places may be described incorrectly, so please leave your valuable suggestions. Actually, I think no matter what you farm, making money or not, understanding diseases is very important. If pigeons get sick and cannot be treated promptly and effectively, then they will infect healthy pigeons, causing unnecessary deaths.