SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART IV. 301 



clean both drinking part and barrel often and dropping a small 

 piece of quick lime each time Jjelps to keep the water pure. Some think 

 a creek the proper thing, and there may be those that are, but we 

 believe ordinarily they are among the most expensive of water systems. 



Cleanliness, as everyone knows, is conducive to health. Therefore, 

 we should observe it about the premises. Strange as it may seem, we 

 have actually read articles in the swine journals since the beginning 

 of the twentieth century, defending the old time mud and water wallow, 

 the retreat of about all the enemies of health, an unsightly, excuseless 

 nuisance that would not be tolerated for a day by any sane board of 

 health. Instead, give them shady retreats through the summer with 

 good pastures of as great a variety of grass as possible, dig two or 

 three pits close together and keep the corn cobs gathered up and trans- 

 form into charcoal, it will surprise anyone who has never tried it 

 to see how much they will eat of it. Keep a box of salt where they 

 can eat at will. We do not approve of feeding salt and ashes mixed 

 but feed each by itself. 



To keep pigs healthy they must have exercise. Therefore, we must 

 see that they get it by feeding through the summer weather about 

 nine o'clock morning an evening. They soon form the habit of work- 

 ing the pastures for two or three hours at each end of the day while 

 it is cool. Have a regular time to feed and you can depend on the 

 pigs being there promptly on time. If they are not over fed on grain 

 they will take daily exercise and as a rule keep healthy during the 

 summer months. But as September goes by, or not later than the 

 advent of October, conditions have changed, a fact not to be lost sight 

 of as we believe more pigs go wrong at this time than any other. 

 Some of them that have been doing well now begin to show a staring 

 coat and do not come to their meals as briskly as usual. We hear 

 a cough and soon some are absent from the trough altogether. We 

 find them lying down, the breathing is jerky, and they have a decidedly 

 pessimistic appearance. Like as not, in a few days we find a dead one 

 and more of them off their feed. Ordinarily the owner makes a hasty 

 diagnosis of the situation and concludes they have cholera brought on 

 by feeding new corn and begins treatment by feeding some cholera 

 remedy with the result conditions grow worse instead of better. 

 What we ought to do in all such cases is to cast about and locate the 

 cause and get at work to remove it instead of doctoring effects. In 

 most of these cases the cause is not difficult to find. 



Go through the country in the month of October (which is the 

 connecting link between warm and cold weather) and we will find on 

 nine out of ten farms summer conditions yet prevailing. The pigs 

 have been in the habit of sleeping on a warm soil scraping together 

 leaves, corn husks or most anything to make a soft comfortable bed 

 and prefer this to going in the pens and lying on the hard board floor, 

 with the result that they become chilled through. On cool frosty nights 

 they squeal, pile up, steam and take cold; then the trouble begins. We 

 have made a post mortem of many of these victims and never failed 

 to find the seat of trouble in the lungs. To prevent this, clean the 



