No. 4.] SWINE BREEDING AND FEEDING. 215 



Mr. Louis. I am conducting the swine department of 

 "The Farm, Stock and Home," published in Minneapolis; 

 and the question is very often put to me by feeders from 

 Duluth, Minneapolis and St. Paul, "What ails my hogs?" 

 This year I received the report from one man that he had 

 lost two hundred through feeding city swill. Now, there 

 is a certain danger in feeding city swill or hotel swill, 

 especially if much of the meat of hogs from the West is 

 contained in that swill. The farmer is no more honest 

 than men engaged in other callings ; and I have noticed that 

 when a man's hogs are getting disease:! he wants to put them 

 on the market if there is any possibility of doing so. I think 

 that the investigation made at Chicago, by direction of Sec- 

 retary Rusk, will help this matter considerably. But cer- 

 tainly a man runs a great risk in feeding hotel swill. But I 

 will say this: if I were a feeder of hotel swill, I should 

 consider whether I could not make it more profitable by 

 making it more solid with corn meal. Now, the error that 

 a great many feeders fall into is in feeding milk alone, when 

 really, if they put thirty pounds of meal into every hundred 

 pounds of milk, it would double the feeding value of that 

 milk. 



Secretary Sessions (to the chairman). Did you ever 

 cook your swill ? 



The Chairman. I cooked it for quite a while, but it 

 made my hogs so sick I stopped it. I have found out con- 

 siderable by experience. I commenced feeding swine thirty 

 years ago, and have fed them ever since on city swill. 



Mr. Louis. 1 never fed city swill. 



The Chairman. I cannot cook my swill and have my 

 hogs do as well as they will upon raw swill. We lose a hog 

 and do not know what the reason is, and of course we lay it 

 to the city swill. I don't think we lose a larger proportion 

 than Western breeders do. We may lose one out of one 

 hundred. Here is a question from the box : "Is hog chol- 

 era prevalent this year in Massachusetts ? " I would like to 

 call on Mr. Cheever of the cattle commission to answer that 

 question. 



Mr. A. W. Cheever. I can only say that there have 

 been very few calls on the commission to investigate cases 



