LIVE STOCK breeders' ASSOCIATION, 21 T 



paid- a high tribute to the Shorthorn cow when he explained the fact 

 that one of his shoulders was lower than the other by the statement 

 that it was made lower by lugging from the barnyard to the dairy those 

 large buckets of milk that were drawn from the old Shorthorn cow. 



If I can say one thing this afternoon that will impress upon the 

 farmers here the necessity, the importance, of changing the character of 

 the live stock upon his farm and eliminating the scrub as well as the 

 scrub pure-breds, then I shall not feel that I have talked in vain. I 

 say scrub pure-hrcds, and I say it advisedly, because not every pure- 

 bred animal is good and there is not a herd in the land in which you 

 cannot find a few that ought to be eliminated and sent to the markets if 

 the owner expects to continue to improve that herd and to improve 

 the general character of the breed that he represents. In some herds 

 you will find that there are a very few of this class of scrub pure breds ; 

 in other herds you will find, unfortunately, a larger per cent; some 

 of these scrub pure breds are the result of an unfortunate method of 

 handling — by that I mean that the man who has those cattle gives them 

 a treatment that even scrub cattle do not deserve. He sends them out 

 upon a scant pasture in the spring, and they chase back and forth, 

 walking continually to get enough sustenance to merely maintain life. 

 I can find pastures in Missouri, I can find pastures in any state in this 

 country, that are nibbled so close to the ground that a self-respecting 

 goose would not seek to find nourishment in them. That is no method 

 of handling pure-bred cattle — no method of handling any kind of cattle ; 

 and the farmer who takes cattle of any kind, no matter how well bred, 

 no matter how well developed, and maintains them for ten generations 

 in that manner, has got, at the end of that time, a herd of scrubs. You 

 can breed feeding qualities into cattle, and you can also starve the feed- 

 ing qualities out of your cattle, and it has been successfully done by 

 breeders of all kinds of stock all over our land. I am speaking ad- 

 visedly. I have seen men buy good, well developed representatives of 

 the beef breeds ; I have seen the descendants of that same class of cattle 

 ten years from that time, and, gentlemen, you would not know them, 

 and the man who furnished the foundation stock did not desire it to be 

 known that they were offspring of his own splendid herd that he was 

 then maintaining. Now, then, if you expect to maintain good cattle, 

 if you expect to maintain good live stock of any class, you must expect 

 to give them intelligent treatment and reasonable treatment. I want 

 to emphasize by repeating that you can starve the feeding qualities out 

 of any class of live stock, and it ought not to be done, because in doing 

 that you are only taking money out of your own pocket, checking 

 against your bank account. Take the advice of our friend, Wing, and 



