244 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



zard. It was a board shed open to the south, and invariably I 

 would find them lyinfi- down close together like a flock of sheep, 

 chewing their cud and apparently unmindful of the storm or cold. 

 My experience in caring for horned cattle was that there would 

 be several in the lot that were bosses, and would assert their au- 

 thority by taking possession of nearly all, if not quite, the one 

 side of the roughness rack, the feed box and a majority of the 

 space under the shed. All of these conditions meant expense to 

 me, and because of the loss in gain from the unrest and the grain 

 and hay fed to them. 



Then, again, if you are fattening them for the open market, 

 you are discriminated against 25 cents per 100 pounds on account 

 of your stock having horns. The eastern order buyer does not 

 want them for his customers in the large eastern cities ; hence you 

 lose the competition, and about your only market is the local packer. 

 Late years some get around this horn proposition by dehorning, 

 but that is troublesome, expensive, and, besides, not nature's way, 

 and in this busy world it is easy to neglect it. Then you might be 

 justified in handling horned cattle if they were so much superior 

 in every way to the Angus except the disagreeable horns. But are 

 they? Do the competitive awards bear us out in this deduction? 

 Do the price they sell for fat or lean in the largest live stock mar- 

 kets in the world justify our belief? Think it over. Here is what 

 Rappel Brothers & Co. say, who are one of the leading firms at the 

 Chicago yards: 



March 22, 1901. 



"A bit of advice that can be acted on with good benefits is to 

 beware of all horned cattle without getting liberal margins, for as 

 the days wear on when this class of stock becomes less noticeable, 

 buyers fear them most on account of the bruises, etc., which de- 

 tract doubly from their value in the carcass, and therefore ignore 

 them entirely, unless at prices that are low enough to insure against 

 all possible loss. At least 15 to 25 cents on natives and 20 to 40 

 cents on westerns is not too much reduction to make in comparison 

 with those which are dehorned, for that is about the ratio of dis- 

 crimination which buyers are making." 



Secretary Coburn, in his report for 1902, says: "It is esti- 

 mated by those who have paid most attention to such statistics 

 that not less than 200 persons in the United States each year are 

 seriously injured by cattle horns; and that by the same means a 

 hundred thousand cattle, horses and colts and innumerable sheep 

 and swine are annually destroyed. That two-thirds or three- 



