Tin: i.rxi; I'LAuri-: or CATTLE. .>.> 



appearances, healthy, but on cxainiir.it ion, with the view of granting a 

 certificate for removal to the country, it was found to carry a large mass 

 of encysted lung. She was accordingly killed, and an encysted dead 

 mass of about S inches by I \v;s found. On August i, aline Short-horn 

 co\v from a healthy region in Central Xew York, which had passed 

 through the inspection-yard direct to Ill-ami's stable under permit and 

 surrounded with all due precautions, contracted the lung plague and 

 had to be killed and the stable cleared out and disinfected anew. 



4. In January, 1879, Charles Reeves, of Success, Suffolk County, 

 New York, bought two calves from the Billard herd, which spread the 

 lung plague broadcast over the east end of Long Island. They did 

 not thrive well, but were not noticed to be specially sick. In June, six 

 months later, he lost several animals infected by the unthrifty calves, 

 and July 19, Professor Law had three more of the herd slaughtered in 

 the advanced stages of lung plague, the result of the purchase of the 

 calves which were affected with these chronic encysted masses. 



Instances of this kind can be multiplied, but this will serve no good 

 end. The importance of the matter is seen when we say that in all the 

 infected States at the present time, there are numbers of apparently con- 

 valescent animals standing in herds which they may at any time infect, 

 and ready to be sold, it may be, to carry the disease to the most distant 

 parts of our territories. 



CHRONIC CASES IN THOROUGHBREDS ESPECIALLY DANGETIOU.S. 



Such a conveyance of the disease is the more probable that it is the 

 high-priced thoroughbred stock which are the most likely to be allowed 

 to recover from the infection, and it is these that are mainly shipped 

 west. Under a false sense of economy the Executives of the different 

 infected States decline to pay a sum at all approximating to the market 

 value of these animals, and the owners decline to have them disposed 

 of at a low figure so long as a chance of recovery remains. Thus it is 

 that our 40,000,000 head of cattle, and their progeny for all time, are 

 recklessly imperilled because men, ignorant of our great danger, refuse 

 to authorize an expenditure which is relatively but as a drop to the 

 ocean. 



It is quite true that infected thoroughbreds cannot be so dis- 



tributed with the same impunity as infected cattle of common breeds. 

 Being registered in a herd-book, and all transfers by sale or otherwise 

 made public, they cannot be sold without buyer and seller being well 

 known to each other and to the general public. They cannot be surrep- 

 titiously carried from one State to another, for either they must lose 

 their record and value, or the pages of the herd-book will reveal the 

 transaction and lay the owner open to prosecution. Yet, in spite of all 

 this, there is the great difficulty of establishing the fact of pre-existing 

 disease in the sellers' herd; and there is the expense and uncertainty of 

 the law which will deter most people from entering on a litigation of this 

 kind. Indeed, the usual course in our experience has been to pocket 

 the first loss as the least, and to try to be more particular in future pur- 

 chases. The dangers from these apparently recovered thoroughbreds 

 are, therefore, almost beyond expression, and no consideration of economy 

 which allows or contributes to their shipment westward or southwa "" 

 should be entertained for a single moment. 



But, beside the great peril, there are reasonable grounds for paying 

 the owners of thoroughbreds as much, relatively, as the proprietors of 

 scrub cattle. First, what is expected is only in ratio with their current 



