424 Veterinary Medicine. 



ASSORTING THE TUBERCULOUS ANIMALS FOR SALE IN A GIVEN 



STATE. 



A still more injurious result comes from the order of given 

 States, that the admission of store cattle shall be guarded by the 

 tuberculin test of each animal, and the supineness or worse, of 

 adjacent states in establishing no effective safe guard against the 

 disposal of the tuberculous culls in the unprotected State. Cattle 

 from the west or elsewhere in the United States, arrive in a great 

 public market as, for example, New York, they are here tested, 

 those that stand the test are shipped into one of the States re- 

 quiring the test (Massachusets, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, 

 Canada), and those that have shown the reaction of tuberculosis 

 are sold into the herds of the State in which they were tested. 

 The most malicious enemy of the New York stock owners, could 

 not devise a surer means of stocking the herds of the State with 

 tuberculosis than this atrocious system. Yet when the present 

 writer had a bill introduced into the legislature to correct the evil 

 the opposing interest proved strong enough to prevent it from 

 coming to a vote. The legislative committee on tuberculosis 

 which sat later, and upon whose attention the subject was pressed, 

 also practically ignored it and the statute which this commission 

 inspired leaves the matter as bad as before. Under the present 

 law the New York purchaser must secure his own interests by 

 having every animal he buys tested by a trustworthy veterinarian. 



Sale of Sound Animals Concentrates the Tuberculosis. The 

 action of one or more States in admitting store cattle only after a 

 tuberculin test, acts directly in encreasing the relative number 

 of tuberculous animals in adjacent States. The purchaser from 

 Pennsylvania for instance, goes into a New York herd and pur- 

 chases all the best animals on the condition that they pass the 

 tuberculin test uncondemned. It follows that the New York herd 

 is left with the tuberculous cattle only, and those that, aside from 

 tuberculosis, are of low value or profitless to keep. Further as 

 the advance of tuberculosis is proportionate to the relative number 

 of tuberculous subjects in the herd or building, and the concen- 

 tration of the poison, the depreciated herd is almost certain to 

 become rapidly and generally affected by the disease. 



The Denial of Indemnity for Tuberculous Animals Killed. 

 Several American States (and notoriously New York in the 



