Heart Probe—A Method for Obtaining Blood Samples from Chickens

Abstract

The increasing use of the inorganic phosphorus and calcium content of blood plasma and sera in the diagnosis of rickets makes a simple method for obtaining blood for such analyses desirable. Though blood so obtained can no doubt be used for other kinds of analyses, the method described here was developed primarily for use in connection with studies of rickets in chicks at the Laboratory of Poultry Nutrition at the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station and has proved very satisfactory during the past three years in which time 3,000 chicks and about 300 hens have been bled.Though the idea was not original with the authors, it has been developed by them to the extent that the time consumed is relatively short and the mortality of the chicks is sufficiently low to make it practical.The possibility that the use of blood analyses in nutritional investigations may be limited somewhat .