642 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



with blue grass and white clover, which the stock do not eat when there 

 is plenty of feed on the dryer ground, but in the fall, after it freezes, they 

 will eat there until it is gone or covered with snow. So by having a sur- 

 plus through the summer it is not wasted, but only kept for winter use. 



THE HOG. 



W. S. Farquhar, before Page County Farmers' Institute. 



The great antiquity of the hog is fixed from the fact that several fossil- 

 species have been found in deluvial deposits of Europe and allied species 

 in India. His native country was Europe, Asia and Africa. The utility 

 of the hog as an article of food is in great measure owing to the remark- 

 able fecundity of the animal, it being capable of reproduction at about 

 one year of age and producing from eight to twelve and even more at a 

 birth twice every year. Hence it would look as though the supply would 

 always be equal to the demand. Vauban has estimated the product of a 

 single sow with only six at a time in ten generations to be about six 

 million five hundred thousand, of which he deducts five hundred thousand 

 on account of accidental death, but his sows must have lived longer than 

 they do now and he must not have been troubled much with hog cholera. 



The filthy habits of the hog are due in great measure to its domestica- 

 tion. The wild hog is cleanly and selects its food chiefly from vegetable 

 substances. The hog has the propensity to wallow in the mire chiefly to 

 protect itself from insects and flies to which its thin covered skin exposes 

 it. The wild hog is in this respect no more filthy than the elephant, the 

 rhinocerous, or the hippotamus. 



No animals displays the changes arising from domestication more than 

 the hog as may be seen by contrasting the large, lean, savage, long legged 

 wild hoar leading dogs and horses and men a long and weary chase with 

 the small domestic, plump, short legged, well bred hog of today, scarcely 

 able to get to his feed or from one side of his pen to the other. The wild 

 hog is a native of the Eastern Hemisphere, including Britain, from which 

 the Berkshires were developed. In America, Australia and the Polynesian 

 group the hog was unknown originally in a natural condition but having 

 been turned out everywhere by the early navigators who discovered the 

 coasts and islands of the Pacific he has propogated his species so rapidly 

 that he is everywhere abundant, either in a state of confinement or a state 

 of nature. During the middle ages the wild boar abounded in England and 

 France and in England he was protected by the game laws during the tenth 

 and eleventh centuries. Hunting the wild hog in the old world used to 

 be one of the great sports of the times and it is said that the flesh of the 

 wild hog was much superior to that of the domestic animal of today. It 

 was a singular fact, however, that the flesh of the boar was superior to 

 that of the sow, while in the domestic animal the flesh of the boar is unfit 



