STATE A.GRK I LT1 RAL SOCIETY. L'.'io 



disease. This is important, as it is plain that excrement, etc., which is 

 contaminated with the germs, being conveyed in railroad trucks, may in 

 this manner take the disease to the most distant States. I think thai 

 experiments should have been carried further, in testing the question of 

 infection through the air alone. The following experiment by modification 

 of the virus and infection, producing the disease, in so mild a form as not 

 to kill the animal, perhaps rendered the pig oonsusceptible to another 

 inoculation. "Dr. Law. in 1878, during investigations (Agric. Reports) 

 upon hog cholera, placed a healthy pig in a pen between two infected ones, 

 and with the ventilating orifices within a foot of each other. Internal tem- 

 perature elevated on the ninth, tenth, and eleventh days, with lameness in 

 the right shoulder. On the twenty-fourth day the temperature rose two 

 degrees and remained 104° F. and upward for six days, when it slowly 

 declined to its natural standard." Rabbits and mice are very susceptible 

 to the disease, and becoming infected as they often do by eating from the 

 same trough as the diseased pigs, they may carry the infection to places 

 at a distance. 



General Remarks. — In veterinary practice, we have this advantage over 

 practitioners in human medicine: we can stamp out a contagious disease 

 by destroying the affected animals. To destroy and cremate the diseased, 

 to thoroughly disinfect the premises and isolate infected places, are the 

 only methods to prevent spread of disease. Stamping out the cattle plague 

 in England, some years ago, was successful. When we consider the great 

 number of ailments the pig is subject to — contagious, parasitic, etc. — it 

 seems very strange that it does not occur more forcibly to our minds that 

 much of that disease may be — nay, I will say must be — due, to a great 

 extent, to the horrible filth which the poor animal eats and in which he 

 sleeps. In the State of California this dirty state of things — or, in other 

 words, this very objectionable method of manufacturing pork — does not 

 exist to such an extent as it does in other parts of the world. In a state 

 of nature the pig finds a new and clean bed every night, and maintains 

 himself upon healthy food. Many people imagine that anything is good 

 enough for a pig to eat and drink, seeming to forget that the filthy mate- 

 rial enters their own stomach in a somewhat altered condition in the shape 

 of ham or sausages. In Canada I have frequently seen pigs lying for 

 weeks and months in pens where absolutely no straw had been thrown, and 

 no pretense at cleaning out had been made, the animals reposing in heaps 

 of dung. In some places I have noticed pig pens in immediate contact 

 with human excrement coming from a neighboring privy. And, although 

 it may, to some extremely sensitive minds, appear too disgusting to men- 

 tion such a matter, yet these animals were in the habit of devouring 

 human foeces. And there is no doubt whatever in this way pigs may 

 become infested with the same parasites that occur in man. I am not 

 wandering from the subject at issue when I state these matters, as they 

 indirectly bear upon the subject. We know, beyond a doubt, that pigs 

 and other animals may and do take into their stomachs the eggs of para- 

 sites; then why should they not also swallow, in the same manner, these 

 germs of hog cholera? Food for swine in England is termed " swill," and 

 this consists of refuse of all kinds — vegetables, etc.; and this food, if it 

 deserves the name, forms a suitable habitat for any disease germs that 

 may be floating in the air. 



Experiments so far go to prove that inoculation is successful; but I con- 

 sider that good would result from further research in that particular direc- 

 tion. Probably the virus after being passed through the body of some 

 other animal and thereby becoming modified — as in vaccination, to wit, cow 



