Form D-1 · keep with your duck
The Duck
Owner's Manual
Care, feeding, housing and training of your duck. Modelled on the manual Gary Dahl packaged with a Pet Rock in 1975, in the same unbroken deadpan — except that a rock needs nothing and a duck needs a great deal, so everything under the joke here is true.
The straight-faced part is the format. The line marked Actually is the real advice, and it is the reason this packet exists rather than just being funny.
A manual that talked somebody into buying a duckling on a whim would be a bad piece of work. This one is mostly trying to talk you out of it — and failing that, to make you good at it.
Section 1
Congratulations
You are now the owner of a duck.
Please read this manual in full before your duck arrives. If your duck has already arrived, read it faster.
Your duck has been supplied without batteries, instructions, an off switch, or any interest in your plans for the afternoon. This is normal and cannot be returned as a fault.
Actually: There is no consumer-protection framing that applies here. A duck is livestock in most countries, and in many places keeping poultry means registering with an agriculture department and following disease rules.
Section 2
Unpacking
Do not unpack your duck alone.
A duckling will attach itself permanently to the first suitable thing it sees moving. If that is you, you have not acquired a pet. You have become one.
The window for this is hours, not weeks, and it does not reopen. There is no undo.
Actually: Imprinting is real and effectively irreversible. A duckling raised alone on a person is a duck that cannot be rehomed easily, cannot be released at all, and will be distressed without you for the rest of its life. Get ducklings in company, from the start.
Section 3
Housing
Your duck requires water. This is not negotiable.
A bowl is not water. A duck needs enough depth to put its whole head under, and enough surface to sit on. Anything less and you are running a duck at reduced specification.
Your duck will convert any lawn into mud within one season. This is not a defect. This is the duck operating exactly as designed.
Actually: Ducks need daily access to water deep enough to submerge the head, or eyes and nostrils get infected. They also need a shelter that shuts properly at night: foxes account for more dead domestic ducks than everything else put together. Ramps in and out of any water, always.
Section 4
Feeding
Your duck will eat almost anything, which is not the same as being able to.
Do not feed your duck bread. Your duck will strongly disagree with this instruction and should be overruled.
Approved: waterfowl or poultry pellets, oats, peas, sweetcorn, chopped lettuce, and whatever it finds in the mud, which will be a great deal.
Actually: Ducklings need more niacin than chick feed provides; a deficient duckling develops leg problems that do not fully reverse. Grit must be available or fibrous food passes through unused. Bread fills a duck without feeding it, and a high-carbohydrate diet in a growing bird is linked to angel wing, which permanently prevents flight.
Section 5
Housebreaking
No.
We appreciate that this is a short section. It is a short subject.
Your duck will produce, on average, every fifteen minutes, everywhere, for the whole of its life. There is no training programme. There is no product. There is a mop.
Actually: Ducks genuinely cannot be house-trained — they have no sphincter control to train. Indoor ducks mean nappies or constant cleaning, and most people who try it stop. Plan for an outdoor bird.
Section 6
Training your duck
Your duck can be taught the following commands.
Come. Yes. Reliably, enthusiastically, and mostly for food. This is the one that works, and it works well enough to look like obedience.
Sit. Your duck is already sitting. Take the win.
Stay. Your duck will stay exactly as long as nothing more interesting exists anywhere in the world.
Roll over. Performed constantly, in water, for its own reasons, never on request.
Play dead. Do not teach this. If your duck performs it unprompted, telephone a vet.
Attack. Regrettably, yes. A drake in spring requires no training whatsoever in this area and will demonstrate on your ankles.
Actually: Ducks are trainable in the follow-the-food sense and recognise individual people. They are not trainable in the dog sense. Breeding-season drakes can be genuinely aggressive, and a drake kept with too few hens will injure them — keep several hens per drake.
Section 7
Company
Your duck did not come alone. If it did, that is the fault.
One duck is not a smaller amount of duck. One duck is a broken duck.
Your duck requires other ducks. Not a mirror, not a cat, not you, however flattered you were by section two.
Actually: Ducks are flock animals and a solitary duck is a welfare problem recognised as such by every keeping guide worth reading. Three or more is the usual minimum, and they should be ducks.
Section 8
Operating noise
Your duck has one volume.
If your duck is female and a mallard breed, she quacks, and she is audible from the next street. If your duck is male, he wheezes, and your neighbours will prefer him.
There is no mute. There is no night mode.
Actually: Domestic ducks are louder than wild mallards because nobody ever bred them for quiet. Check your local rules before you buy: plenty of residential areas allow hens and prohibit anything that carries.
Section 9
Maintenance
Your duck is largely self-maintaining and will still need a vet.
Your duck spends hours a day preening. This is scheduled maintenance and must not be interrupted for photographs.
A duck that stops preening, stops eating, or sits apart from the others is reporting a fault.
Actually: Common problems are bumblefoot from hard or dirty ground, angel wing from poor early diet, and injuries from predators or over-mated hens. Not every vet sees poultry — find one who does before you need one, not during.
Section 10
Service life
Your duck is not a seasonal purchase.
Expected service life is eight to fifteen years. Please compare this with the length of your current lease, relationship, and enthusiasm for ducks.
Your duck has made no equivalent commitment and has not read this manual.
Actually: This is the part people get wrong. Ducklings bought as Easter novelties are a documented welfare problem and most do not reach adulthood. If you cannot promise a decade, the answer is no.
Section 11
Disposal
There is no disposal.
Your duck may not be released onto a park pond. Your duck may not be released anywhere.
A domestic duck put on a pond is not going free. It usually cannot fly, has never met a predator, does not know what winter is, and will be dead within weeks.
Actually: Dumping domestic ducks is one of the most common forms of pet abandonment and it is illegal in many places. If you can no longer keep ducks, rehome them through a poultry keeper, a farm, or a waterfowl rescue. Every country has them.
Take it with you
The manual, as an actual packet
Eleven sections and the warranty, printed off this page by headless Chrome through the print stylesheet. No navigation, nothing in colour it does not need, and no section split across a page break.
Download the PDF 7 pages · 49 KB · or just press Ctrl+P on this page, which produces the same thing
Warranty
The last section
If what you wanted was a pet rock
Then here is one, free, and it is the better product.
A rock needs no water, no company, no niacin, no fox-proof shed and no decade. It will not convert your lawn to mud, it will not imprint on you, and it can be rehomed at any time by putting it down.
Gary Dahl sold about a million of them in 1975 with a manual very like this one, and the joke worked because the care instructions were genuinely empty. Every line in this manual has something real underneath it. That is the difference between the two animals, and it is the whole point of the packet.
Ducks are wonderful. Ducks are not a novelty. Both things are true.
If you are going ahead anyway
Good — ducks are excellent, and the people who keep them properly are very fond of them. Start with a keeping guide from a waterfowl organisation rather than a video, get at least three birds, build the shed before the ducks arrive, and find the vet first.
Nothing here is veterinary advice. It is the shape of the commitment, which is the part the novelty photographs leave out.