No. 4.] WORK OF CATTLE COMMISSION. 231 



that you could not refill a barn after you had taken the 

 cattle all out, without a very great prol^ability that you 

 would bring some more with the disease right into it, — it 

 would not do to handle it that way. 



Now, let me give you an illustration. Without calling 

 names, one of the members of our Cattle Commission 

 went into a herd of seventy-four or seventy-five cattle a 

 little while ago, — magnificent animals, many of them im- 

 ported, — and found there a case of tuberculosis. Under 

 the old system that is advised by the modern men who know 

 so much, the Cattle Commissioners should have gone there 

 and killed the whole seventy-five, animals that were worth 

 from one hundred and fifty dollars to two hundred dollars 

 each, because there was one case there. If you had let them 

 stand there without taking out the one infected animal, an- 

 other case might not have occurred for the next five years, 

 and therefore the Cattle Commissioners took this ground. 

 The best thing we can do to eliminate this disease is to protect 

 our herds as. far as we can by taking out the diseased ani- 

 mals and killing them, thus saving the herds that are making 

 milk for human beings ; cleaning them out, but not spending 

 money to stamp out the disease as contagious pleuro-pneu- 

 monia was stamped out. The Cattle Commissioners recom- 

 mended that course, and they asked the Legislature in three 

 or four different years to pass an act that would enable them 

 to go into a herd and clean it the best they knew how, l)egin- 

 ning with the worst case and going along up further where 

 there was less and less, and, if we happened to kill one that 

 was not diseased, then the State should pay for it. That is 

 what we asked, and we only got a law passed to that effect 

 in 1891. 



Now, a few points more, gentlemen, as I must hurry on. 

 I have some notes here now that I want to call your atten- 

 tion to, and I do this in consequence of the many things that 

 have been said about Massachusetts within the last year or 

 year and a half. Massachusetts passed the first law that was 

 ever passed in America for the destruction of contagious dis- 

 eases among domestic animals, yet people talk about Massa- 

 chusetts knowing nothing and doing nothing. Massachusetts 

 passed the first law and made the first appropriation, expend- 



