STATISTICAL AND HISTORICAL REPORT OF SPLENIC FEVER. 197 



Abilene. The law preventing the herding of Texas cattle in summer has been generally 

 enforced, so that few points have been infected. 



A few cases are reported in Washington County, Nebraska. 



The Missouri law has been well enforced ; but a few droves went through Greene and 

 Cedar, communicating the disease, which resulted fatally. 



There has been some splenic fever in St. Francis, Arkansas, caused by permitting 

 native stock to be penned in lots used by Texas cattle passing through the county ; loss 

 very light. 



A lot of Texas cattle brought into Washington County, Virginia, communicated 

 disease to the native stock, resulting in one hundred and fifty deaths. The disease is now 

 fatal in Salem, Fauquier County, Virginia, and sixty-seven deaths have been reported of 

 cattle owned by nineteen farmers and villagers; the loss amounting to $3,000. It is traced 

 in every case to contact with Texan cattle. The people of the village express a determi 

 nation not to allow another carload to disembark there. 



LAWS RELATIVE TO DISEASES OF FARM ANIMALS. 



In closing this partial history of the Texas cattle disease in the United States, a brief 

 digest of the laws relating to it may be appropriate. Several of the States have enactments 

 bearing upon all contagious and infectious diseases, without a distinct specification of any one ; 

 and others have laws relating mainly to pleuro-pneumonia, while including other diseases. 

 Greater uniformity in their legal requirements and restrictions is desirable. This digest is 

 condensed from a more extended statement in the Report of the Department of Agriculture for 

 1869. Either the general Government should enact a law providing for the suppression of 

 contagious diseases of farm stock and for the regulation of the transportation and movement 

 of farm animals, or the State governments should be induced to act simultaneously and har 

 moniously on the subject. Pleuro-pneumonia has a dangerous footing among the cattle of 

 the Middle States, and is spreading south, and is liable to scatter contagion among western 

 herds from which come the principal meat supplies of eastern cities. It is far more to be 

 dreaded than the splenic fever communicated by Texas cattle, as that infection does not 

 pass in continuous progression through one sick animal after another. Yet there will be 

 no safety for northern cattle coming in contact with those from the southern coasts during 

 the summer months ; and effective prohibition of the movement of such cattle from May 

 to November should be secured by efficient legislation. There are other infectious or con 

 tagious maladies of other kinds of farm stock over which legislative control should be 

 obtained by a general enactment. 



There are seven different laws on this subject now temporarily in force in England, 

 and it is there proposed to consolidate and perpetuate them, with suitable amendments 

 The dreaded rinderpest, the ravages of which increased with accelerating ratio until the 

 passage of the law requiring and compensating the destruction of infected cattle, was very 

 rapidly subdued by compulsory and summary destruction of infected and exposed animals. 



In the sea-board States the laws relating to contagious diseases were generally framed 

 with reference to pleuro-pneumonia, but in many of them the provisions are sufficiently 

 general to embrace all communicable diseases. 



A board of commissioners has authority, in Massachusetts, to control the introduction 

 of diseased cattle and take measures to prevent the spread of disease within the State ; 



