152 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



I presume a number of you gentlemen here have attended the state 

 fair year after year, and probably, being ambitious to have a good crop 

 of hogs the following year, have bought a good boar. You got him home; 

 pretty soon he showed up sick, and died shortly; the hogs at home be- 

 gan to get sick, and they died. The fact was, you got a case of cholera 

 from the state fair or the Sioux City fair or some other fair. That was a 

 sort of package on the side in addition to what you paid for a nice boar. 

 You know you always pay a good price when you buy one at the fair; 

 you can buy them cheaper at the farm. Years ago we instituted an in- 

 spection of hogs at the state fair. We were the first state to start it. 

 Some thought it was sanitation on paper or just for the looks of it, or 

 the sound of it; they thought we would not know whether there were 

 any sick hogs at the fair or not. But we soon found out that every ex- 

 hibitor at the fair was a detective so far as his neighbors in the other 

 pens were concerned, and not a hog could miss a meal or cough sixteen 

 times in succession but what I knew it inside of an hour. We have oc- 

 casionally had cholera at the fair and been able to keep it from spread- 

 ing. Last year thirty-two hogs were shipped by one man to the Iowa 

 state fair, and after they were there two or three days we saw the first 

 symptoms of cholera. Two sows farrowed, with fifteen little fellows. We 

 had Doctor Knowles sent here by special request to the Department of 

 Agriculture to administer serum to all the hogs at the fair, if the ex- 

 hibitors wished it. We gave this man's hogs the serum treatment down 

 to the little fellows two days old, sent him home immediately, and used 

 disinfectants very freely. We afterwards heard from him that Doctor 

 Knowles picked out three hogs and said they would die sure, and there 

 were three or four others that he would not promise to live; and, sure 

 enough, he lost seven out of the thirty-two hogs at the fair. He took 

 occasion to say that not one of the little fellows born there died, and 

 that they and their mothers were doing well. 



So the Live Stock Sanitary Association passed another resolution, 

 favoring the treatment of ail hogs exhibited at state, district or county 

 fairs. Following that up, we have rulings now by our Animal Health 

 Commission ready to present to the executive council, to put those things 

 in force regarding all our fairs in Iowa, and regarding the shipment of 

 breeding hogs, or even feeding hogs, into Iowa, unless they be treated. 

 All this will be a part of the machinery if we are going to try to control 

 hog cholera. 



When we come down to the question of controlling it at home on 

 the farm, I am glad to say that there are a good many hog raisers in 

 Iowa who have this machinery at work so far as they are individually 

 concerned. I know hog men that don't ask the privilege of going to 

 any neighbor's hog lot, and very kindly request their neighbors not to 

 go to theirs when they come to see them on Sunday afternoon. Then 

 there are other ways of spreading the disease. We have the common 

 carriers, the crows and the pigeons and the dogs — and the hog buyer. 

 He is one of the most prolific sources of the spread of cholera. He 

 works just in front of the outbreak — that is, so far as the hogs appear 

 to be in bad condition he is ahead of it; but probably the infection is 



