176 



THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



THE OVER-FATTENING OF SHORT-HORNS. 



ADDRESSED TO THE COUNCIL OF THE YORKSHIRE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, BY MR. FATYKBS, OF FARNLEY. 



You have, in the premiums which, with a view to the im- 

 provement throughout the country of horned cattle, offered iu 

 your show grounds, selected, and I think with great judgment, 

 as most deserving of your patronage, that breed called the Im- 

 proved Durham, or, more commonly, the Short-horns; as, 

 after a ten years' close attention to this breed, my experience 

 convinces me that, under proper management, no breed can be 

 brought to an earlier or more profitable maturity of usefulness 

 to the proprietor and the public, and none under rational 

 treatment combines so large an amount of the desiderata of 

 butter and beef. 



But, in the task that you have, and so laudably, assigned 

 yourselves, of promoting the increase and improvement of 

 this breed in the country, you seem wholly to have lost sight 

 of the consideration (and yet one so indispensable to the suc- 

 cess of your object) of the natural character and propensities 

 of the breed in question ; for, as though their milking proper- 

 ties needed none of your encouragement, their feeding qualities 

 all of your fostering care, and as though you had to guard in 

 your treatment of them, not against an innate inclination to 

 plethora, but atrophy, yon have at all your shows, and in the 

 commendations and premiums that you have bestowed, en- 

 couraged, nay, insisted on, as a requisite to successful exhibi- 

 tion, a condition of the animal which all experience and all 

 authority on the subject tell us will be prejudicial alike to its 

 powers of calf-bearing and milking, will prevent all usefulness 

 iu the cow, and is preparing the heifer for no other power of 

 profit to its owner than the prematurity of its prize beef, and 

 the posthumous, but very questionable, so far as its possessor's 

 advantage is concerned, honours of the shambles. 



Now, were it a point of any doubt or dispute, as is the case 

 on the subject of the deeper or shallower draining, whether 

 the stock intended to serve the purpose of reproduction were 

 injured or not by that early obesity which, so far from attempt- 

 ting to correct in their natural temperament, you, through 

 the medium of your judges' awards, do all in your power 

 artificially to promote, I had still permitted the great reluc- 

 tance that I feel to find any fault with your proceedings to be 

 sufficient excuse to myself for a more protracted silence; and, 

 though convinced what alone would be the result of your 

 prolonged experiment, and what intermediate injury was 

 entailed upon the consumers as well as producers of animal 

 food, I had, however, impatiently waited upon your own con- 

 victions. But as I have never heard a contrary opinion 

 hazarded, and as my own experience, as well as that of 

 all the practical men of the past, as well as the present age, 

 to which I have had access, assures me that the indisputably un- 

 natural show-condition of the animal, as you teach us to 

 consider it, is anything but that state of its being which, 

 whether in the heifer orthe cow,canbenefitthepublic,orpermit 

 its owner the profitable exercise of his calling and his capital 

 the present prices of all animal food, so confirmatory of the 

 otherwise notorious fact that the increase of cattle in the 

 country is becoming lamentably unequal to the sustenance of 

 the community, forbid, if nothing else would, that I should 

 hesitate to denounce the system that you are pursuing in your 

 Bhow.yards, as encouraging a wa^te of the food of animals, 

 and a vraste of the food of man. 



And if that premature and over-feeding, so indispensable, we 

 all know, to your show condition, be (as I think you must 

 allow it to be) unnecessary to the fullest development of the 

 frame and functions of the adult female, on what plea, I would 

 ask, can you, whose professed object it is so to direct the 

 operations of agriculture " that the greatest amount of pro- 

 duce may be obtained at the least possible cost of produc- 

 tion," justify to yourselves proceedings which not only pro- 

 voke to a waste of food, but are, in the abuse of it which they 

 encourage, converting nutriment into poison ? 



You will scarcely, I should think, hszard (were you ad- 

 venturous enough) to attempt a defence of these proceedings, 

 involving that intelligent class of farmers from whom your 

 judges are selected, in the contempt that would devolve upon 

 the argument, " that to assure yourselves of the propriety of 

 their awards of your premiums, form, frame, and quality are 

 not enough, but the fleshy condition of the animal presented 

 to you can be the only safe index to the futurity of fat either 

 in itself or its progeny." And here I may ask you to reflect 

 of what useful instruction to the young farmer you are by the 

 permission of this show condition depriving yourselves ; for 

 what can be more important for the young farmer to know, 

 what more advantageous to him, that he should learn, by a 

 process less costly than his own unaided experience, how to 

 select for purchase in the lean fairs the animals that are most 

 calculated to realize his e.xpectatioa on their re-sale in the fat 

 markets ? 



But it is not that you so unnecessarily deprive yourselves, 

 in the awards of your premiums, of this important instruction 

 to the young farmer that I have only to complain, but that, 

 instead of directing him to a right judgment, you are assisting 

 him to a wrong one, and teaching him to suppose that nothing 

 else is requisite to excellence in the cow than what is neces- 

 sary to perfection in the ox. You are also depriving him of 

 the sight, at your shows, of the best animals for breeding pur- 

 poses as models for his guidance in rearing or purchasing ; as 

 the best and most useful cows of every herd must be— as long 

 as you adhere to the system of making a gaudy condition of 

 the animal a sine qua non, as now, to its success — of necessity 

 left at home, from their inability to have been, previously to 

 the show, performing two irrecoucileable processes at once, of 

 putting on your condition, and doing their duty with profit to 

 their owners. 



By the local — more limited in memberhood, and much more 

 limited in resources of a moneyed as well as moral influence — 

 fraternities of the same character as yours, I feel that it might 

 be urged, though inexcusably,! think, even by them, that this 

 gaudy condition of the exhibited animal was necessary as an 

 attraction to the show-yard, and the funds so acquired abso- 

 lutely requisite to the existence of the society ; and so, in fact, 

 the promulgation of error indispensable to the circulation of 

 truth ; but from a society like yours I can expect no such hu- 

 miliating confession. Nor will you, I am confident, as I 

 might surmise as the motive in agricultural societies less 

 firmly rooted than yours, from a disinclination to that reform 

 in their and your proceedings which I am now advocating, per- 

 mit the public or myself to suspect that you fear to give um- 

 brage to the afflaent, and possibly hitherto influential few, 



