160 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



them ready for market at a very early age, I never got 

 through the season without losing a few from fits. This 

 last season, out of about one hundred and seventy-five lambs, 

 not one was made sick. 



Be regular in your feeding, and let nothing disturb your 

 ewes and lambs ; only those persons that the sheep know 

 should be allowed to go among them. A shepherd's crook 

 is a great help in catching lambs, as the whole flock can be 

 crowded into a corner, and by slipping the crook on the hind 

 leg of the lamb sought for, the rest of the flock are but very 

 little disturbed. 



The younger the lamb can be made to dress twenty-five to 

 twenty-eight pounds, the more the profit. Lamb, to be at 

 its best for table purposes, should be under sixty days old, 

 and if you can have them heavy enough when forty or forty- 

 five days old, the meat will be much more tender. 



The sooner the lambs can be dressed after they are sep- 

 arated from their dams the better, as they begin to fret and 

 worry at once ; and if kept in this condition for twenty-four 

 hours without food, as they must be if sent quite a distance, 

 the meat loses much of its fine, sweet flavor, because the 

 lambs are in a more or less feverish condition. There is a 

 right and a wrong way of dressing sheep and lambs, and I 

 am sorry to say the wrong way is the one generally adopted. 



Sheep offal has a peculiar and very disagreeable odor, 

 which impregnates the meat if allowed to remain many min- 

 utes after death. The peculiar taste we have all noticed in 

 mutton, and for want of a better name we call " muttony," 

 is caused by this, and not, as many people believe, by the 

 breed or feeding. The reason that this taste is so frequent 

 is, that all the sheep killed in large numbers are dressed by 

 the butchers at so much per head, and in order to work 

 quickly the butcher or his assistant cuts the throats of sev- 

 eral at once, and then begins dressing them. The first two 

 or three are hung up in a few moments, but if six or eight 

 were killed at once, some of the last ones will have become 

 impregnated with this ofial flavor, and are very diflerent to 

 the taste when cooked than if they had been dressed at once. 



No one can tell the difference by the eye or nose, but you 

 discover it very quickly when the mutton is cooked and you 



