VETERINARY PROBLEMS. 2^ 



Finally, we have a disease in this country which not only 

 has already affected our export trade in live cattle but which 

 is becoming a serious menace to the cattle industry in some 

 of our best stock-raising districts. It has been known for 

 years that there exists, somewhere in the South, a belt of 

 territory the cattle from which when carried to the North in- 

 fect the pastures and destroy a large proportion of the native 

 animals while being apparently in the best of health them- 

 selves. It was also known that cattle taken from the North 

 to certain parts of the South were almost sure to die from 

 the effect, as was supposed, of change of climate. But these 

 facts were never connected, the infected district was never 

 outlined, and we were complacently informed that there was 

 no danger of this disease ever penetrating, to remain perma- 

 nently, beyond the line of frost and snow ; some veterinarians 

 even were skeptical of the existence of any such disease. It 

 is almost incredible that in this country, with such an enor- 

 mous capital invested in cattle, in this age of railroads, and 

 telegraphs and newspapers, that we should so long have re- 

 mained in such profound ignorance of the extent and charac- 

 ter of this infection. Why, instead of being confined ta 

 a narrow belt along the Gulf coast, the district perma- 

 nently infected with this disease extends from the Rappa- 

 hannock in Virginia to the Rio Grande in Texas. Instead 

 of being confined to the low, swampy coast, it stretches for 

 hundreds of miles toward the interior, over sand and plain 

 and hill and mountain ; instead of being checked by the line 

 of frost and snow this infection has pressed forward, slowly 

 it is true, but it has advanced as certainly and regularly as 

 time advances and as the seasons succeed each other. The 

 line of frost and snow was passed a century ago, and yet it 

 is taught to-day by cattle men and veterinarians that this in- 

 fection cannot survive a single winter where frost occurs. 

 This infected district instead of being insignificant in size 

 covers an enormous territory, and all along the boundary- 

 line, which is more than a thousand miles in length, there 

 are disheartening losses of cattle every summer. This south- 

 ern fever has been the great obstacle to the improvement of 

 the cattle at the South ; for nine-tenths of the thoroughbred 

 animals taken to that section ultimately succumb to it. The 



