Live Stock Breeders' Association. 299 



and November are the three months when we are finishing up and 

 want to put on heavy gains. Sometimes it happens that cattle will 

 go off feed, about October, and will not eat what you want them 

 to eat and will not make the gains you want them to. When in 

 Scotland, three years ago, James Bigger told me of a method he 

 employed in getting steers to eat when a little delicate in appetite, 

 which method we have used to good advantage. He recommended 

 the feeding of one-half ounce of crude carbolic acid in bran mash. 

 This freshens the appetite, starts them again to eating, and it is 

 very important that you feed them well during the last few months, 

 and keep up their feed to the very last. We want flesh all over the 

 body, smoothly laid on, and neither soft nor hard, but mellow to 

 the touch. The proper touch for the flesh is like that of India rub- 

 ber; when you press the flesh it should give and then come back. 

 Take an animal with flesh that you press, and the flesh does not 

 come back, that flesh is too soft. On the other hand, we can get 

 animals too hard. When that is the case, oil meal is a good thing; 

 also, cooked oats and corn, or flax seed will help. But sometimes 

 when an animal gets so hard, the only way to fix it is to rub it. It 

 is surprising what you can do for a hard flesh in the last month or 

 two weeks just by rubbing. I have seen animals brought out in 

 this way when nothing else would help them. The steer on which 

 we won the grand championship prize some two years ago in Chi- 

 cago, we sent to Chicago a few weeks before the show and we 

 rubbed him; and he was pronounced by the judge as the best flesh 

 steer he had put his hand on for many years. 



In addition to feeding, there are several other factors to keep 

 in mind. One is the question of grooming. It is very important 

 to have show cattle groomed well. You cannot do this in a week ; 

 it will npt do to start a week before the show. You must start 

 some months before and do a certain amount of it each day. Clean 

 the hair out and go over the animal with a flannel cloth and give 

 it a hand rubbing the last two or three weeks before the show. 

 There is nothing much better than rubbing to get the right kind 

 of coat on an animal. We believe in using the clippers on the head 

 and on the tail. It helped us out in two hard places in Chicago. 

 We won the grand championship, and we won the reserve grand 

 championship by using the clippers. You had better keep the clip- 

 pers off of the breeding animals, but they are especially good to 

 be used on the fat animals. The late Mr. Bigger was the man who 

 put me on to this. He always clipped them from the knees down 

 and from the hocks down. 



