“Some cram them on wheat bread soaked in water, or even in wine of good flavour and bouquet, claiming that they are thereby made fat and tender in twenty days.[185]

“If in the process of cramming the fowls lose their appetite from too much food, the ration should be reduced daily during the last ten days in the same proportion as it was increased during the first ten days, so that the ration will be the same on the twentieth as on the first day.

“Wood pigeons are crammed and fattened in the same way.”

Of geese

X.  “Let us now pass,” said Axius, “to that tribe which cannot live in the barn yard all the time, or even on land, but requires access to ponds.  I mean those whom you philhellenes call amphibia.  I understand that you call the places in which geese are kept by the Greek name [Greek:  chaenoboskeion], and that Scipio Metellus and M. Seius have several large flocks of geese.”

“It is Seius’ practice,” said Merula, “to maintain his flocks of geese[186] in accordance with the five rules I have laid down for poultry, namely:  with respect to choice of individuals, breeding, eggs, goslings and the process of cramming.

“On the first point he requires the slave who buys his geese to select them of good size and of white plumage, because they reproduce their own qualities in their goslings.  This is necessary for there is another kind of geese of variegated plumage, which are called wild, and do not flock freely with the other kind and are domesticated with difficulty.

“The best time for breeding geese is at the end of winter and for laying and hatching from the beginning of February or March until the summer solstice.  They breed usually in the water, diving to the bottom of the stream or pond.[187] A goose lays only three times a year:  and each one should be furnished with a coop about two and a half feet square and bedded with straw:  each of their eggs should be marked for identification, for they will not hatch any eggs but their own.  They are usually set on nine or eleven eggs, never more than fifteen, nor less than five.  In cold weather they set for thirty days, in warm weather twenty-five.  When they are hatched the goslings are suffered to remain with their mother for five days, and then daily, when the weather is fine, they are driven out to the meadows or to the ponds or some swampy place.  The gosling houses may be built either above or below ground, but never more than twenty should be housed together and care must be taken lest the floor be damp and that they are bedded on chaff or some thing of that kind, and that the house is so constructed as to keep out weasels and other beasts which prey on goslings.  Geese are fed in wet places and it is the practice to sow especially for their food supply, using for this purpose any kind of grain, but particularly that salad plant called endive[188] which keeps green wherever there is water, freshening at the mere contact of water