45i IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



business. A man, team and wagon were kept upon the road collecting 

 carcasses from twenty miles around, while many farmers delivered 

 their own dead animals direct to the plant. A wagonload of carcasses 

 was a common sight upon the highway. It was all open and above 

 board, with no thought for the broadcast distribution of infection. 

 Looking backward from the vantage point of 1917, one marvels that such 

 dreadful conditions were countenanced even for a day. 



If ever there was a plague spot on the fair face of God's earth it was 

 that rendering plant. And it was only one of hundreds, possibly one of 

 thousands, of similar establishments scattered thru the Corn Belt coun- 

 try! Then, as now, the disease appeared to deliver a climax of fatali- 

 ties in the late fall and early winter. The frozen carcasses were brought 

 in from a dozen townships and stacked high about the place to wait their 

 turn in the tank. The warm days of Spring turned the spot into an 

 abomination. It smelled to heaven — and then some. The piles of de- 

 funct pork rotted in the sun. The dribbling grease and corruption soaked 

 the earth and stood about in horrid, glassy pools to be washed into 

 the river every time it rained. Incidentally, it might be mentioned 

 that a considerable portion of the annual ice crop of the community 

 was harvested less than a mile below that plague spot — and the people 

 lived thru it. 



The "dead-hog wagon," as the children of the community called the 

 outfit that collected the carcasses traveled all the highways with its 

 festering loads, dripping corruption and germs from farm to farm 

 without hindrance or objections. With such wholesale methods of dis- 

 tribution of contagion in operation the wonder is that a single pig was 

 left in the country. But the order is passing, Glory be! 



HOG HEALTH MUST EE THE SLOGAX 



Hog health must be the working motto of swine breeders if Mr. Hoover 

 is to get that second pig. Unceasing vigilance must be maintained if 

 the present supply of breeding stock is to be kept anywhere near 100 

 per cent efficient. No animal on the farm responds to good treatment 

 and proper care so promptly and satisfactorily as the pig. On the other 

 hand, pigs, like poultry, are quick to suffer from antagonistic environ- 

 ment and insanitary conditions. 



It is an easy matter to spot a pig that is the least bit "off" in condi- 

 tion. The healthy pig is a busy pig; busy either at filling its stomach 

 with the materials and constituents necessary for pork making, or busy 

 snoozing the aforesaid materials into prime bacon. For the porcine 

 digestive machine seems to work most efficiently when the animal is 

 sound asleep. 



The healthy pig wears a glossy coat, a bright eye, a kink in its tail 

 and an investigative snout, eager for any thing that hints of food 

 value. To the eye of the connoisseur — meaning the careful herdsman 

 — the outward appearance and what we may properly call the mental 

 attitude of a pig toward life, constitute an unfailing barometer indicat- 

 ing its physical condition. 



