u 



DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 



[Chap. I. 



of the New York livestock market, wliicli I have been familiar with for 

 many years. Farmers should know that there is a certain market for all 

 the meat-giving animals they can produce, and what they realize, as well as 

 what varieties sell best. 



I have purposely adopted a desultory method, because I think it will be 

 more satisfactory to my readers, whom I do not expect to read the work in 

 consecutive order, and because I find it more convenient to pick up the 

 fugitive facts and jot them down in a sort of mosaic-work, something as 

 nature does its autumn tints, which are now glowing before my window in 

 the full eflulgence of an October sun. 



And here, too, as I look abroad upon my neighbors' fields, and at their 

 cattle gnawing the short pasture, and running after every chance apple 

 dropping from the trees, and then stretching up their necks, looking for 

 more, and browsing off the lower limbs of the trees, I am forcibly reminded 

 that this is not a prolitable method of keeping fiirm-stock. Day by day the 

 milch cows fail to give the supply that good pasture will always give in this 

 good butter-making month of October ; and day by day the flesh of all the 

 animals is wasting, so that, by-and-by, when the cold and storms of November 

 force their owner to bring them into winter quarters, they are not in such 

 a condition that he may carry them economically through. There is a great 

 error in farming, tliat the scene before mc forcibly reminds me of — it is the 

 error of keeping any kind of farm-stock upon short pasture, and most 

 I)iirticularly in autunm, so that they come to winter quarters falling oS" in 

 flesh, rather than gaining, which is the condition that all animals should be 

 in when brought from the pasture to the stable or feeding lot. 



Some of th6 farmers of the Eastern States of the kind just alluded to, 

 who keep their stock upon the shortest possible pasture, and consequently 

 generally have scrubby animals, and always meet with great difficulty in 

 wintering those, would learn a useful lesson if they would visit the blue- 

 grass pastures of Kentucky, and see in what luxuriant feed the sleek 

 Durhams of that region are kept. They would there learn one of the 

 secrets of value of that breed, and why they attain at three years old a size 

 and weight of beef never equaled at six years old by the scrub breed 

 common in Virginia and in the hilly regions of Ohio and Indiana, which are 

 sometimes designated in the New York market as "pony cattle," or "old 

 style," and averaging, when fat, about six hundred pounds in the beef A 

 similar scrub breed is known in Kentucky as "moxmtain cattle," and the same 

 style is very common in North Carolina, Georgia, and other Southern States, 

 where I have often seen full-grown steers, and fat, killed for beef at four 

 years old, that would not average four hundred pounds of beef. These 

 cattle were treated, too, all their lives, just like too many of the same class 

 in all the New England and Middle States — like those now before me, eking 

 out their existence xipon the scanty herbage of autumn, in a closely-cropped 

 summer pasture, and never fed with forage prepared for winter, until the 

 o^vne^ is driven to it by an early winter storm. 



