THE WEEDS OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 79 



In a recent Agricultural Gazette you inquired of readers whether cattle ate 

 the wild castor oil plant. I state positively that they eat it in all its stages of 

 growth, and after it is dead. As to its effects, I may say that I saw twelve 

 head of young cattle (out of a travelling mob) die within an hour after eating 

 dry castor oil, and last autumn, after turning a six months' heifer out of a 

 yard that it had been in all night without food, I found it dead in a patch of 

 dry castor oil close by shortly after. It appears to me. to be very fatal to 

 hungry stock. I have seen my sheep eating both dry and green, also rabbits 

 eating the small young plants. (Murga, 6th January, 1908.) 



Further classification of the evidence. (1) Evidence that stock eat the.- 

 weed (Thorn Apple), but that it does not poison them: 



Mr. E. W. Turner, junior, writes : In reply to Mr. Maiden's inquiry whether 

 stock will eat castor oil weed, I have seen sheep eat the dry pods freely. I 

 could not guarantee there were many, or even any, seeds in the pods, but can 

 swear to the pod-eating all right. Of 1,000 sheep running amongst castor oil 

 for a fortnight, only two died, and as most of the mob were eating the pods, 1 

 could not understand why it should affect some and not others. The paddock 

 in which the sheep were had plenty of castor oil and a fair amount of grass. 

 The identity of castor oil cannot easily be mistaken, because, no matter what 

 name it goes under, it always has the same beastly smell. 



Mr. H. V. Jacob, Boggabri, writes : I have seen this plant growing in large 

 quantities in this district, and some ten years ago the late Mr. A. T. Brooke, 

 who at that time owned Milchengorie Station, told me that he would never 

 allow the plant to be cut up, as it was good feed for sheep. I have seen the sheep- 

 at times strip every particle of leaf off the bush, and apparently it did them no- 

 harm, although I must confess the sheep did not touch it till practically every 

 other particle of food was consumed. In the 1902 drought the plant w r as fairly 

 luxuriant, and the sheep cleaned every leaf off without any harm, while the 

 plague pf mice, which were at that time very thick, climbed the stalk of the 

 plant and devoured the seed very rapidly. As the seed is enclosed in a very 

 prickly pod, the cattle or other stock could not touch it, but the mice were able 

 to gnaw the pod through, and thus get at the seed. The latter is small and 

 black, and probably each pod contains a few hundred seeds. The castor-oil 

 plant prefers the rich river flats, as a rule, although it often grows on the black 

 soil near the river, but I have never seen it grow anywhere but fairly handy 

 to the river, and it never seems to spread to any extent. 



Mr. van der Merwe, then of the Hawkesbury Agricultural College, wrote to 

 me tha't in the Orange Free State, South Africa, stock never seemed to touch 

 it, but they must have gradually acquired a taste for it, for one year after the 

 plants were nearly fully developed the cattle started eating them, and soon 

 stripped off all the leaves, leaving only the stems and thorny seed heads, and 

 even these, which were not quite ripe, were eaten. I distinctly remember a cow 

 picking off one of these heads and chewing it, w T hile I wondered how they 

 managed to eat the prickly stuff. The following year the young plants were 

 not given a chance, but were eaten as soon as they grew high enough to be fed 

 off. It was known that the plant was poisonous ; but we had begun to look upon 

 it as not poisonous to cattle. It may be that the cattle were gradually immun- 

 ised against the effects of the poison by small doses, until they could even eat 

 the seeds with no bad effects, and that this may account for the fact that there 

 were no fatalities. 



Mr. Percy Murray, of Canowindra, writes : I have seen cattle and sheep 

 eating these pods greedily all day long, and when I have killed ration sheep the 

 stomach has been full of seeds. Fowls are also very fond of them ; also quail 

 I have shot have nothing else in their crops but the castor seed. The cattle 

 also eat the leaves, but sparingly; rabbits will eat all the bark when they are- 

 cut down. I am satisfied in my mind that the castor oil here is not the cause of 

 deaths. 



Another letter is from a well-known pastoralist in the Merriwa district, who- 

 desires that his name shall not be published. He writes: It is a common thing 

 for cattle to eat the leaves of the castor oAl plant, without any ill effect. 



