134 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



EFFECT ON THE STOCK. 



Numerous witnesses spoke to the injury to stock owing 

 to the damaged pasture. This injury was twofold, consisting 

 first in the low condition to which the ewes were reduced, 

 at and after lambing, from insufficiency of food, and the 

 consequent increase of death-rate among them, and secondly, 

 in a diminution in the crop of lambs, and deterioration in 

 their quality. 



Admitting the serious injury done to the pasture by 

 voles, to which your Committee can testify from personal 

 inspection, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the 

 sheep dependent on that pasture must have suffered to a 

 considerable extent. To quote Sir Walter Elliot's words, 

 " The importance of these early grasses to flocks emaciated 

 by previous scanty fare, at a time when the ewes, gravid with 

 young, require more than ordinary nourishment to enable 

 them to rear their lambs, explains how disastrous any 

 diminution in their still scanty food might prove, whether 

 from severity of weather, or other unusual cause, such as the 

 swarming of voles." But it is not easy to estimate the 

 extent to which the death-rate of the ewes was increased, or 

 the crop of lambs diminished as the direct result of scarcity 

 of pasture caused by the voles. 



REMEDIES. 



No concerted or systematic attempts to stamp out the 

 plague in its earlier stages seems to have been undertaken 

 by the farmers of the district affected, and this is the more 

 remarkable because some of them, at all events, had the bitter 

 experience of the outbreak in 1875-76 to warn them of the 

 serious results of allowing the voles to get ahead. Isolated 

 efforts were made by some tenants to rid their land of voles 

 by burning the grass and heather, by killing them with men 

 and dogs, by turning out cats, and by poison ; but the effect of 

 such piecemeal endeavours seems to have been well nigh 

 inappreciable. Your Committee are not prepared to declare 

 that landowners and farmers could have arrested the plague, 



