SHEEP. 995 



where the soil is porous enough to absorb that rainfall, free 

 from swamps and marshes. The English sheep are more toler- 

 ant of moisture than the Merino, less subject to foot-rot. All 

 sheep had better be wet in the fleece than on the feet; the)' 

 should have dry flooring at all hazards. The Leicester is per- 

 haps best adapted to low grounds if these must be employed 

 is somewhat more sluggish than the Cotswold, not so hearty a 

 feeder, the equivalent of the Jersey and the Holstein. The 

 Cotswold has been not inaptly compared to the lordly Durham. 

 English shepherds hold that their own distinctive breeds achieve 

 the highest sum total of results where bred with sole reference 

 to mutton; and the production of mutton requires a rich, succu- 

 lent herbage, lasting many months of the year. Hence the 

 sheltered milder slopes of the Atlantic Coast and on the Pacific 

 coast, a strip comprising Humboldt and Mendocino counties in 

 California and Western Oregon, Washington and British Colum- 

 bia, are indicated as a propitious climate for the British breeds. 



Mutton. To the great majority all kinds of mutton are 

 alike, provided the age, general condition and methods of butch- 

 ering are alike. But there is no doubt that the chalky downs 

 of Dorset, and the limestone pastures of the blue-grass region 

 (home of the Improved Kentucky), furnish the finest mutton 

 known. But the crowning point in the superiority of the English 

 mutton breeds over the Merino is their precocity. And it is 

 simply a truism to say that the flesh of a young animal is bet- 

 ter than an old one. Hence a Cotswold lamb which will furnish 

 forty-five pounds of dressed meat where a Merino of the same 

 age will yield but eighteen or twenty is the more profitable, 

 even though it may have consumed thrice the amount of feed. 



Neither need the farmer be deterred from entering upon the 

 more strictly meat-producing branch of sheep husbandry by con- 

 siderations of distance from market if his soil and climate are 

 specially adapted. When Kentucky can send twenty thousand 

 sheep in a year to the single city of Boston, and sell them at 

 six cents a pound while New England mutton is selling at four, 

 there is little danger in growing good mutton anywhere. Mer- 

 inos for the granite hills of Middlesex, and Cotswolds or Downs 



