318 Seventeenth Annual Repoet of the 



Another lias a thorough-bred herd which he has spent the greater 

 part of his life in getting together and developing. It represents 

 to him a sentimental as well as a very large intrinsic value. One 

 such, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, was prostrated in 

 the New York invasion of 1870, and by our present rule would 

 have been compulsorily slaughtered under a compensation not 

 exceeding $75 per head. I might go on adducing imported herds 

 of sheep (Ivambouillet, Shropshire, etc.), or pedigreed hogs of 

 high value, which would all have to go underground for a song, 

 on account of a disease which would have spent itself and left 

 the animals well in two or three weeks. 



In some instances the pedigreed animals are unique of their 

 kind, cannot be replaced for any money, and their extinction robs 

 the nation and the world of the as yet unparalleled fruits of long 

 continued, careful and judicious selection and breeding. If this 

 were the destruction of the individual animals only, it would be 

 bad enough, but it means far more, as the invaluable, unborn 

 progeny of these animals has been lost. 



Considering the slight and transient nature of the illness, is 

 not this a measure of grievous and oppressive wrong? Is it in 

 human nature to accept this without a feeling of resentment ? 



Resentment bears its natural fruit, antagonism. The owners 

 of such live stock would infinitely prefer to hide the outbreak, 

 to keep the stock in strict isolation, and thus to protect the neigh- 

 bors' herds- in a way that the officials had declared impossible. It 

 is the old story which it has been so hard to teach to legislators, 

 that a lack of indemnity, or an insufficient indemnity, will nega- 

 tive the best intentions of every veterinary sanitary law. And 

 the working out of the evil principle is all the worse, that it is 

 applied to a disease which is so disproportionately mild to the 

 severity and oppressiveness of the remedial measures. 



2. Concealment of cases delays the advance of disease through 

 a herd, and the early recovery of the herd as a whole prolongs 

 the infection. Concealment of the disease means the removal and 

 close isolation from public view, of all animals thai show symp- 

 toms of the disease. This nut only prevents the infection from 

 promptly reaching all members of the ]\cn\, but it delays the onset 

 of the malady in successive cases, and this prolongs, for a month 



