NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 293 
less tuberculous. Of the cattle of all classes that have come under my own 
observation about four per cent have been more or less tuberculous, and 
I know that I am conservative when I say that six per cent of dairy cattle 
in the state of Iowa are infected. 
I am referring to the number affected and the number rejected at 
anti-mortem inspection to show you that up to a given point, or time, in 
the progress of this disease there are no physical signs of this disease. 
The animal looks healthy. There are no apparent signs of disease. And 
this is, as I have remarked, one of the perplexing phases of tuberculosis, 
for most men absolutely refuse to believe that there is much the matter 
with a hog or steer or a cow when it eats well, looks well and to all 
appearances is well. 
Not long since I had a visitor, a farmer from Butler county, who hap- 
pened into the packing house when slaughtering was in progress. Short- 
ly after he came in we were finding some tubercular hogs. Soon we found 
we had nearly a carload of infected hogs, all fine looking, fat hogs, but 
many of them were badly infected, the lesions of disease showing ex- 
tensively on the viscera and also on the carcass in a good many instances. 
After we had made our final examination of these infected hog carcasses 
there was, of course, some condemnations — some good looking carcasses 
that according to the U. S. regulations, had to be consigned to the fertil- 
izer tank as utterly unfit for human food. 
Our visitor at this juncture made vigorous protest, saying that it 
looked like an awful waste to put such good looking hogs in the tank; 
many a poor, hungry man, he said, would be glad to get such meat as that, 
and yet you are going to convert it into fertilizer. But when I questioned 
him more closely and put the matter up to him individually, "Would you 
like to eat such meat, knowing what you do about the condition of the 
animal in life and this evidence of this loathsome disease, which you 
have witnessed here this morning; would you actually eat such meat if 
you knew it?" And he answered, "No, I guess I w^ould not." "But," said 
he, "These hogs could be sold and enter into the general channels of 
trade and nobody w ould be any wiser." These carcasses most of them look 
all right now, since you have disected out those diseased glands and pro- 
cesses, and a butcher or nobody else, not even a veterinary inspector 
could see or discover anything that even looks suspicious about the most 
of them now. 
Gentlemen, w^e hear such remarks almost every day with reference to 
this disease. Its progress is so gradual and insiduous, and after the animal 
is eviserated there may be no lesions left on the carcass which one could 
discover by any ordinary microscopic examination. Do not misunderstand 
me at this point, hov/ever, because we do see many carcasses of both cat- 
tle and swine w^here the inroads of tuberculosis are so extensive as to 
cover the whole pleura and pentoneum and involve almost every lymphatic 
gland in the carcass. And the remarkable feature about some of these 
extensive or generalized cases is that the animal may still have the ap- 
pearance of health. 
The disease is non-inflamatory as a rule and as a rule in animals there 
is not much disturbance of the temperature. 
