REPORT OF STATE VETERINARIAN. 37 



where all the diseased stuff is condemned by expert" meat inspectors. 

 All kinds of food animals are shipped from the various towns of this 

 State to the central markets, slaughtered and shipped back again. If 

 some arrangement could be made for more slaughtering to be done 

 at home the freight on the live animal and on the dressed carcass could 

 be saved. It seems to be a well established fact that the dressed beef 

 that is shipped into the interior of the State by the packing houses, 

 while being free from disease, is inferior in quality to that dressed at 

 home. It seems that it would be a valuable thing if the Board of 

 Agriculture could formulate some plan of encouraging a suitable central 

 slaughter house for each of the larger towns of the State. Such a 

 consummation would doubtless result in good in several different ways. 

 If the killing of live stock at any good sized town could all be done 

 at one plant, only one set of hands would be required to do the killing, 

 and a lot of time would be saved which is now wasted by from three 

 to a half dozen sets of hands going a mile or two to the country to 

 dress just one or two animals each. If there were four slaughter 

 houses in a town, a central slaughtering plant would save the expense 

 of three sets of hands. Another source of economy would be the pos- 

 sibility of utilizing the by-products if all of the animals at an ordinary 

 sized town were killed at one plant. Valuable by-products are thrown 

 away and wasted as the slaughtering is now done, and the loss of these, 

 with the freight to and from the public markets, must come out of the 

 pockets of cattle producers. Another good reason for central slaughter- 

 ing plants is that the premises would naturally be used more and be better 

 equipped for handling the carcass in a cleanly manner, and it would 

 be kept in a more wholesome condition. Still another advantage is that 

 in an ordinary sized town, with comparatively little expense, a competent 

 inspector could be provided by the city, whereby the live stock could be 

 inspected before and after slaughtering and the public supplied with 

 meat free from disease, and which had not been deteriorated in quality 

 by long cold storage. Another reason for encouraging the slaughtering 

 of live stock at home is to provide a greater number of markets for 

 cattle which would naturally tend to increase the prices that the pro- 

 ducers would get. There are a number of things that the Board of Ag- 

 riculture could do to help in the development of the plan of central 

 slaughtering houses in all of the larger tow^ns of the State, but no one 

 thing would lend more encouragement to the proper course in this mat- 

 ter than the extending to such plants the privilege of handling for im- 

 mediate slaughter cattle from south of the tick fever quarantine line. 

 At various centers in Soo^ithern Missouri, for the lack of this privi- 

 lege, southern cattle are shipped, in some cases, 150 miles, dressed and 



