320 AN EGG FARM. 



on the wild cattle ranges to the northwest of here, 

 ranchmen with hearts of flint breed cattle, to have them 

 run all winter without hay or shelter, subsisting on the 

 dried grass and running the risks of unusually severe 

 weather. Every three or four years a blizzard or an ice 

 storm that covers the grass, followed by zero weather, 

 kills by cold, combined with hunger, one-tenth, or one- 

 fifth, perhaps, of the whole. And once in five or six 

 years, sometimes three-fourths or five-sixths. But tak- 

 ing the average of a series of years Hie business is profit- 

 able. Now for every steer that dies a lingering death, a 

 score or more have their ears and tail frozen off and one 

 or more of their feet horribly mutilated, but they live 

 through it. Fancy the owner turning in his warm bed 

 at midnight and listening to the storm ! For my part 

 I envy not the make-up of a man who is willing to get 

 money that way. I would rather work by the day dig- 

 ging ditches. And on the same line concerning poul- 

 try, if the mortality of broiler chicks runs from fifteen 

 or twenty to forty or fifty per cent in brooders, then, I 

 say, to sheol with the brooders. Artificial rearing of 

 chicks becomes, in such a case, an inquisition of torture 

 to poor dumb brutes." 



The coming generations will commiserate their prede- 

 cessors for being so barbarous, when the time arrives 

 that, except through accident, as, for example, the 

 inroads of a weasel or predatory cat, the poultry keeper 

 who makes poultry raising a business will no more 

 expect to have young chicks die than nowadays the 

 farmer expects to have his young calves or colts die. In 

 our newer states there are no members of the society 

 with the long name and everybody acts as he pleases 

 towards dumb brutes and often pleases to act contempti- 

 bly, but in the older states the society flourishes, and 

 the miscreant who abuses a horse, or maltreats a cat or 

 dog even, unnecessarily, is sure to hear from it. This 



