Commissioner of Agriculture &2# 



The drove which brought the infection had been picked up by 

 two dealers, Coppy and Grobe, in the Buffalo stock yards, October 

 27 (the day after the first lot of infected cattle was shipped to 

 Pennsylvania), but the sale was made offhand, without registration 

 and without weighing the stock, so that no record had been kept of 

 the transaction and they had thus escaped the careful scrutiny 

 which had been applied to all herds that had left a record behind 

 them. 



This furnished the first real light on foot and mouth disease in 

 New York. It demonstrated that the disease actually existed in 

 this state and that the infection had been carried direct from the 

 Buffalo stock yards. The cattle that carried the infection had left 

 the stock yards on foot and traveled by highway to Akron. There 

 was no possibility of charging the Akron outbreak to infected rail- 

 way cars. On the basis of this knowledge more intelligent, precise 

 and effective preventive measures could be applied. 



The certainty that the infection had been in the East Buffalo 

 stock yards on October 26 and 27 rendered it increasingly likely 

 that, through infected stock leaving these yards around those dates, 

 many new centers of the plague had been implanted in localities 

 widely apart from Buffalo and from each other in this state and no 

 less in other states, especially in those to the east and south, which 

 were in the lines of most active railway traffic in live stock from 

 Buffalo as a distributing center. The precision with which stock 

 shipped by rail could be traced and located furnished a well 

 grounded hope that all cases leaving the stock yards in this way 

 could be followed, and any infection, planted and propagated in 

 such new localities, quickly discovered and extirpated. On the 

 other hand, there was a strong probability that by tracing back to 

 their source the cattle which, about the dates mentioned, had occu- 

 pied the particular yards now known to have been infected, we 

 could speedily find the origin of the disease in cases that had 

 occurred elsewhere and antecedent to the Buffalo infection. 



DISCOVERY OF THE DISEASE IN MICHIGAN 



Inquiries along the lines just mentioned bore fruit November 

 22, 1908, when the federal inspectors decided definitely that an 

 outbreak, at first mistaken for simple stomatitis, was in reality 



