224 CONFINEMENT TO YARDS AND DRY FEED. 



thirty to fifty per cent, more lambs ! Our English flocks, it is 

 true, are usually small ; and among the established natural 

 characteristics of the ewes are those of bringing forth twin 

 lambs and having a sufficient supply of milk to raise them 

 /. But they also, so far as my knowledge extends, 

 fewer lambs. How is this to be accounted for? If the 

 Merino is a hardier animal than the mutton sheep, its lamb, 

 it would seem, ought also to be hardier. And so I have no 

 doubt it is, if it is born in a perfectly well developed, normal 

 condition, and if it gets anything like a corresponding supply 

 of milk. It is not among such that the annual losses among 

 our lambs occur. Those which perish are generally undersized 

 and feeble, or else they do not obtain sufficient support from 

 their dams. It is these causes and failure to take the ram. 

 which keeps the rate of increase so low in Merino flocks. 



This comparative want of prolificacy is the weak point 

 now really the only one for the purposes for which they 

 are grown of our American Merino sheep. Yet no other 

 point has received more of the care of those breeders who 

 have been so successful in improving them in every other 

 particular. Their comparative failure is occasioned by no 

 obstacle inherent in the breed, as I could show from a 

 variety of considerations and direct proofs, did space admit 

 of it. If it can be shown that there is a radical error in 

 our modes of management that we habitually compel the 

 pregnant ewe to violate " the ordinances which nature has 

 inculcated for her guidance" need we go further to find 

 the causes of that failure ? Can we wonder that lambs are 

 born imperfectly developed when ewes are rigidly confined 

 for five or five and a half months through the entire term 

 of pregnancy in little yards ; and even then fed almost 

 invariably within doors so that they have no inducements 

 left to take the least degree of exercise and so that more 

 than four -fifths of the whole time they are inhaling the 

 atmosphere of a stable, without going out into the fresh air and 

 sunlight? Can we wonder that an animal which obtains its en- 

 tire summer subsistence from green vegetation does not secrete 

 milk abundantly, and can not be bred to secrete it abundantly, 

 when, from the first to the last day of gestation, it is unnat- 

 urally restricted to exclusively dry food ? And when young 

 and not fully matured ewes, or old and decaying ones, or 



here uses the word, i. e., it oftener fails to take the ram. Literal barrenness, or a 

 want of the power of conception, is almost unknown in the Merino ; and its failure 

 to take the ram, generally, springs from incidental and not necessary causes. 



