cattle: commissioners' report. 249 



indirectly understand that the work that has been done at Port- 

 land is very satisfactory to the Bureau of Animal Industry at 

 Washington and this will have an influence in holding, if not 

 raising, the reputation of Maine dairy products. We should 

 always bear in mind that a good price for a good article is far 

 more profitable than a low price for a poor article. 



Tuberculous cattle are not all sick, and it should not be under- 

 stood that way, and there is no doubt that a certain per cent 

 will apparently recover. This fact was practically demonstrated 

 by our work the last year. There were thirty fine and healthy 

 looking cows out of several different herds that showed a char- 

 acteristic reaction in the spring that were quarantined and dried 

 off and turned to pasture and after running out in the open air 

 two or three months were all taken up and retested by different 

 veterinarians, and out of the thirty, five stood the test and were 

 released. They are all on record and all under the observation 

 of the commissioners and will be closely watched and will 

 be retested some time in the future in order to carry out the 

 experiment. 



We hear it said occasionally that the commissioners are not 

 getting ahead in the work and that tuberculosis is increasing 

 instead of growing less. It seemed that way to the commission- 

 ers until within the last year, and we wish to call attention to a 

 few facts we have on record. We will take the Solon Creamery 

 section for an example. Within the last few years the commis- 

 sioners have had considerable trouble in Somerset county, espe- 

 cially around Solon, Embden, Bingham and North Anson, and 

 have destroyed several large herds, and when the commissioners 

 were notified that the patrons of the Solon Creamery were to 

 test their herds, we felt fearful that there would be a large per 

 cent diseased, but after the work was finished it was very grati- 

 fying to the commissioners to learn that, out of over eight hun- 

 dred cows tested, only two and one-half per cent were found dis- 

 eased. And still another section where the commissioners have 

 been doing a large amount of work within the last few years, is 

 located in Oxford county, in the vicinity of the Oxford Creamery 

 at South Paris. By the work that has been done in the past it 

 would seem to be a badly infected section, and yet out of eight 

 hundred cows tested only twenty-six were found to be diseased, 

 or about three per cent. So these two cases and others we might 



