LIVE STOCK breeders' ASSOCIATION. IQI 



task of scrub annihilation is accomplished. What's the matter? Why- 

 have we not made greater progress? 



A famous American general is credited with the declaration rel- 

 ative to one of his campaigns that he would "fight it out on that line 

 if it took all smnmer." We have already devoted almost a century of 

 summers to our plan of attack on scrubs and have only made a two 

 per cent start. Evidently our plan of campaign is defective. Maybe our 

 supposed new method is really an old, antiquated one, else why such 

 slow progress? This paper is already becoming lengthy and older and 

 wiser heads than mine have wrestled with this problem. I frankly con- 

 fess my inability to suggest a new method that would promise to speedily 

 and effectually surmount all of the old obstacles to universal live stock 

 purification. I will, however, present a few suggestions born of close 

 observation. 



"scrub" pure bred breeders. 



That quaint old Englishman, Ben Johnson, said that "clothes make 

 the man." We know that appearances always count for more than their 

 par value, either for or against a man. I said a while ago that the 

 largest display of unsheltered implements I saw in a ten-mile drive, 

 was on the farm of a pure bred breeder. That man was related to the 

 "Bill Tumbledown" family and is a positive detriment to the crusade 

 against scrubs. Why ? Because the average farmer who has been breed- 

 ing scrubs has come unconsciously to the belief that the owner of pure 

 bred stock — "thoroughbreds" he calls them — is a pure bred farmer, that 

 all of his methods ^md operations should harmonize with his pretensions 

 about his stock ; when he finds that the animals with high-sounding pedi- 

 grees are so unpreposessing in appearance by reason of indifferent, 

 "'scrub" care as to look no better than his own mongrels, and that the 

 surroundings of rickety, ragged fences, neglected buildings, foul and 

 muddy lots ; thickets of cockleburrs and the whole premises resembling 

 the typical "widder woman's place," his ardor to replace his scrubs with 

 pure breds is very apt to cool off —his respect for pure bred stock and 

 pure bred breeders undergoes a shrinkage and if he does buy some of 

 those unfortunate animals he is apt to handle them by scrub methods, be- 

 cause he is unable to see wherein Bill Tumbledown's methods are any 

 better than his own, and disappointment is bound to result. In the 

 language of the street. Bill is a misfit. He is a scrub breeder of pure 

 bred stock, a mixture of old and new methods in which the old predomi- 

 nates and his influence is a wet blanket on the great industry with 

 which he has aligned himself. The multiplicity of members of the Tum- 

 bledown familv is the oreatest of all hindrances to the banishment of 



