12 THE LUNG PLAGUE OF CATTLE. 



If we except unfenced countries, like the steppes of Eastern Europe, 

 where the herds of different owners mingle freely and succeed each 

 other on the same pasturage, we cannot conceive of a condition of 

 things better calculated to disseminate contagion than that represented 

 to exist in Ireland. To comprehend its full bearing we must take into 

 account the average small holdings of the Irish tenant, who in many 

 districts owns no more than a single cow, and has therefore but one 

 calf to sell. The dealer therefore who buys twenty calves has in so 

 doing often to run the risk of twenty chances of infection from as many 

 different places, to say nothing of the almost certain exposure to con- 

 tagion on the premises where they may have been kept over night on the 

 way to market, or in the public market itself. Having run the guantlet 

 of these perils, his twenty calves are sent off to a distant pasture, and 

 on the way are once more subjected to the risk of infection by resting 

 over nights in premises habitually let for such purposes, and therefore 

 presumably infected. When they reach the pasture they mingle with 

 one or two hundred more cattle, most of them picked up as these have 

 been and subjected to the same numberless chances of contagion. Such 

 a pasturage thus represents the contagion existing in one or two hundred 

 different places spread over a wide area, plus the contagion introduced 

 by the countless numbers of other cattle sent to the great fairs where 

 they were purchased, plus the contagion laid up in the premises habit- 

 ually let for the temporary accommodation of cattle going to and from 

 the fairs. When we consider that this change of ownership, this assort- 

 ing into lots of equally promising animals, this sending to market, and 

 this remingling with fresh cattle from different quarters both there and 

 in the next pasturages, is repeated several times every year, it certainly 

 seems as if no enemy could have devised a method better calculated to 

 spread the contagion. But this is npt all. This habit of incessant 

 marketing is stimulated by the introduction of lung plague into a herd 

 or pasturage. On being apprized of such an occurrence, the owner 

 often picks out those of his stock which are still apparently healthy, and 

 hurries them off' to the first available market, that by their sale he may 

 secure what salvage he can. The unwitting purchaser, congratulating 

 himself perhaps on an unusually promising bargain, turns them out in 

 another large pasturage with scores of others, where in a month or two 

 later the disease will certainly develop, and the same process of the 

 sale and scattering of infected cattle is repeated. The healthy animals 

 by this system of constant marketing are exposed to a maximum risk of 

 infection, and as the infection of a herd becomes a stimulus to its re- 

 peated sale, the public markets are necessarily the very hot-beds of the 

 poison. 



Apropos of the remark that Dublin dairymen were often cattle deal- 

 ers as well, may be quoted from Gamgee's report to the privy council 

 in 1862, that in the dairies of Dublin 51 per cent, of the cows were sold 

 yearly because affected with the lung plague. 



In every country into which the lung plague has been introduced its 

 ravages have always borne a direct ratio to the movement of cattle ; 

 and in Ireland, though the necessity for such movement was at its least, 

 yet a strange artificial activity, even in the absence of all new im- 

 portations of the disease, has kept the unfortunate island in the rank 

 of the most plague-stricken countries of the world. For centuries this 

 fair land, thanks to its insular position, had remained a stranger to 

 animal plagues; then one unlucky importation, backed by a most per- 

 nicious system of cattle traffic, has entailed upon her over forty years of 

 pestilential desolation. 



