98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have his own boys in the slaughter-houses to kill the cattle. 

 These boys were often unskillful or not strong enough. When the 

 beautiful milk-white oxen, with their large, pathetic black eyes, 

 were brought to be slaughtered, these butcher boys had often to 

 give thirty blows before the poor beast fell. Every animal that 

 was brought into the town paid by weight at the octroi, but they 

 were generally kept waiting for days in sheds outside the town. 

 In these sheds there were drinking-fountains always running, 

 but the plug at the bottom was taken out, so as to prevent the 

 animals from drinking, and thus their weight was lightened. 

 The railway companies never dreamed of watering the cattle dur- 

 ing the many days that they were packed together in the trucks, 

 sweltering and faint under the fierce Italian sun. The Roman 

 Society for Protection of Animals sent a dozen pails to Foligno, 

 a central railway station, offering to pay a certain sum annually 

 for the watering of the cattle. The pails were returned after two 

 years, never having been used once. Nor are things much better 

 in this country. The cattle which come up from Transylvania 

 and other distant parts of the empire are neither fed nor watered 

 on the journey, which sometimes takes a week. Then when un- 

 shipped they are tied together in threes and fours, hit and fright- 

 ened, and thus driven to the slaughter-houses. They sometimes 

 fall down in the road from terror and exhaustion. 



Galician pigs often lie in thousands for a week together in the 

 snow and slush outside the slaughter-houses, waiting to be killed. 

 Thus far my own experience and things I ^.ave seen. In England, 

 if I am to believe newspaper paragraphs and statistics, things are 

 as bad if not worse. For a short resume of the horrors attending 

 the transport of cattle by land and by sea, let anybody whom it 

 interests turn to pages 65-69 of Dr. A. Kingsford's Perfect Way 

 in Diet, headed The Sufferings of Cattle, and they will learn well- 

 authenticated facts which will fill them with pain and. disgust. 

 The following figures are sufficiently significant. They are taken 

 from the report of the Veterinary Department of the Privy Coun- 

 cil for the year 1879. 



In 1879, 157 cargoes of Canadian cattle were shipped for Bris- 

 tol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London, in which total there were 

 25,185 oxen, 73,913 sheep, and 3,663 pigs ; but of this number 154 

 oxen, 1,623 sheep, and 249 pigs were thrown into the sea during 

 the passage, 21 oxen, 226 sheep, and 3 pigs were landed dead, and 

 4 oxen and 61 sheep were so wounded and suffering on arriving 

 that they had to be slaughtered on the spot. In the same year 

 there were shipped from the United States for the ports of Bris- 

 tol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Grimsby, Hartlepool, Hull, Leith, Liver- 

 pool, London, Newcastle-on-Tyne, South Shields, and Southamp- 

 ton 535 cargoes of animals, of which 76,117 were oxen, 119,350 



