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BREEDING AND TREATMENT OF DAIRY CATTLE. 43 



are soon finished off for the shambles when the inexorable law 

 of man's convenience requires it. Fleshy cows are always 

 desirable, rather than lean kine that are always lean, if only 

 they milk well ; they surfer less from a fickle climate, and 

 always attract better customers. What all practical dairy 

 farmers aim at, ultimately, is profit ; and this is best secured 

 by having cows good for milk and flesh, and feeding them 

 generously but not lavishly. The man who starves his cattle, 

 be they good ones or only middling, secures the profit he 

 deserves viz., very little, or none at all. To feed cattle well, 

 and to treat them kindly, will earn a man profit while he lives 

 and peace at the end. Try it, everybody, and see. 



Housing. 



In a state of domestication, animals become habituated to 

 shelter from severe weather, and they must have it; but if they 

 were allowed to relapse into a feral state they would neces- 

 sarily learn to do without it. Shelter, however, has become a 

 necessity to them in time of storms, and frosts, and snows, 

 though there are farmers not a few who appear not to think 

 so. And so it is that cows are commonly left out in damp and 

 cold, far too late in the fall of the year, night and day alike, 

 even when the weather, pitilessly wet and cold as it so 

 generally is in October and November, punishes them 

 severely. We may commonly see them, in the late autumn 

 and early winter months, standing with arched backs in the 

 insufficient shelter afforded by a wall, a hedge, or a plantation 

 this last by far the best of the three. It is not the cold that 

 hurts them, or would hurt them, but the wet and the cold together. 

 A dry cold is not much to be dreaded, though there will neces- 

 sarily be a large consumption of carbon in the stomach to main- 

 tain the temperature of the system. But when in cold weather 

 the cows' backs are constantly wet with rain, or sleet, or melt- 

 ing snow, evaporation is at work sucking out the warmth from 

 the animals' bodies. This it is that punishes them most of all, 

 and consumes most rapidly the heat-producing elements of the 



