THE DISEASES OF SHEEP 317 



of sheep and lambs under observation fed by his 

 brothers for some years, good plain practice, using 

 the same water supply, has resulted in not one in- 

 stance of " water belly. " The writer has been in- 

 formed of other instances where oat hay had seem- 

 ingly caused this disorder without the accompani- 

 ment of an overdose of salt. 



In not one instance in thousands will the use of 

 clover or alfalfa hay with corn silage in not too 

 great quantity and corn, with oats or bran if de- 

 sired, cause this disorder. 



This is not a treatise on starvation, but it may 

 be as well to drop here a hint that sheep that have 

 been starved near to death for some time are not 

 usually profitable animals to buy, since they take 

 a long time to recover and many will die in the 

 process unless great care is used in building them 

 up again. The writer has known instances of fam- 

 ishing sheep being bought for a few cents each on 

 some dried-up and overstocked range, shipped to 

 other more fruitful ranges distant some ways and 

 there turned out on good grass. They died rapidly, 

 however, and continued to die for some time after 

 being placed on the good feed. 



IMPORTANCE OF POST-MORTEM DISSECTION". 



The novice in sheep breeding and feeding, or the 

 old hand for that matter, should take frequent op- 

 portunity of post-mortem examination of a sheep 

 recently dead, seeking to see whether the cause of 

 death is from disordered digestion or parasitic in- 



