IN RELATION TO THE WAR. 503 



by hand labor and eats it himself. If he misses a crop, there is 

 famine, which in those regions has killed more people in the last 

 hundred years than even this terrible war has killed. In this country 

 we raise a crop, feed most of it to the beasts. If we have a shortage, 

 we kill a few of the beasts and eat them and a part of their food. 

 Fortunately our animals are in the habit of eating largely of food 

 that we can eat, in which respect our agriculture differs greatly from 

 the agriculture of certain other peoples. For example, the Arab of 

 the desert has a great wealth of beasts, but his camels, goats, sheep, 

 and donkeys eat grass, coarse herbs, and bushes which he cannot 

 eat; whereas, our animals are grain eaters to the extent of three to 

 four billions of bushels a year. Therefore our problem is greatly 

 simplified by this precious element of elasticity. 



When we start out to shorten our animal supply we cannot do it, 

 however, in an indiscriminate way. The horses and mules we must 

 have to maintain production and keep the army going. We must 

 have the cows for dairy products. We must have the sheep for 

 wool and also mutton. We must keep the hens for their invaluable 

 eggs. There remain but two classes under consideration for the 

 possible shrinkage ; namely, swine and beef cattle. As between these 

 two we have the fact that swine are much more efficient in that they 

 return 29.9 per cent, of the production value of the food eaten, while 

 the steer returns but 14.8 per cent.^ Therefore it is plain that the 

 simplest place to gain bread at the expense of meat is to reduce our 

 holdings of beef cattle not only for the reason of their inefficiency as 

 meat producers when the food they have consumed is considered, 

 but also because the food eaten by beef cattle can be taken over by 

 the more valuable animals, especially in this particular emergency; 

 namely, the cow, the horse, the mule, the sheep, and even the goat. 



It is a misfortune of society that attempts to change any industry 



1 Eckles and Warren, " Dairy Farming," p. 8. 



On the basis of the grain eaten by these animals — " It may be roughly 

 estimated that about 24 per cent, of the energy of grain is recovered for 

 human consumption in pork, about 18 per cent, in milk and only about 3.5 

 per cent, in beef and mutton. In other words, the farmer who feeds bread 

 grains to his stock is burning up 75 to 97 per cent, of them in order to pro- 

 duce for us a small residue of roast pig (he should have said meat) and so 

 is diminishing the total stock of human food." — " Roast Pig," Science, 1917, 

 XLVL, 160. 



