1907.] DISCUSSION. 269 



or thirty thousand lambs slaughtered here which came from 

 Canada. They had laws there which controlled the dog, and 

 what is of more importance, they had public sentiment with 

 the sheep growers, and the government did what it could to 

 help the sheep men, and they grew vast numbers of lambs and 

 shipped them for you to slaughter and eat here. 



Now there are a great many things that come up that might 

 be interestingly dwelt upon in connection with the discussion 

 of such a subject as this. It has been on my mind for a long 

 time. Now in the matter of the mere killing of sheep, it does 

 not seem to me that that is the great difficulty. I was reared 

 in a region where it was a poor, farmer who did not have at 

 least fifty or sixty, and so on up to two or three hundred sheep 

 on his farm. It was in one of the newer and more sparsely 

 settled districts, I will admit, but it was a fair average farmings 

 region. We had no manufacturing centers immediately about 

 us, and, by the way, they are places from which the dogs, to 

 some extent, come. The damage is not entirely done by the 

 neighboring farmers' dogs by any manner of means. It is 

 done in many cases by these irresponsible curs that are owned 

 by nobody, and whom nobody claims, from surrounding towns 

 and villages. Our location, however, was not situated so that 

 they worried our sheep. The trouble arose chiefly, I think, as 

 Mr. Stadtmueller has well said, owing to the gradual change 

 which took place in economic conditions. I mention this to 

 show that the trouble with dogs is not a new idea. It is an 

 old, old complaint. Writers upon ancient agriculture mention 

 the fact that sheep vv^ill not fatten after being chased by 

 wolves, and it is now generally understood that if you have a 

 lot of wethers out they will not fatten in the field if dogs are 

 allowed to worry them. If some miserable dog gets into a 

 flock early in the season, while it may not kill any sheep, or, 

 at the most, not more than one or two, there are still apt to be 

 a number of ewes that will slip their lambs before the time 



