216 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Barb wire has had its careful trial by newspapers, whose 

 cokimns have been open, and in signal instances have in- 

 vited complaints against it. But its most signal defence 

 seems to me to come negatively from the diligence with 

 which the societies for prevention of cruelty to animals, 

 and their national organization, the American Humane Asso- 

 ciation, have followed the inquiry into this subject, for the 

 past two or three 3^ears. They have not found in it an oc- 

 casion for the action the public has the right to expect from 

 them, did genuine grounds for such action exist ; on the con- 

 trary, they have openly refused appeals for such action. 

 Certain very broad and striking facts, both in the oldest 

 and the newest States and Territories, have followed the in- 

 troduction of barb wire. Many thousand acres of cheap and 

 poor land, not believed worth substantial fencing after the 

 old style, are being fenced in New England, increasing the 

 area of available pasturage. Not a few farmers are resort- 

 ing to its use to cheaply protect their wood lots, holding it 

 not a good principle to feed their beasts on tender saplings 

 that may be worth protecting. 



In the South, under its new system of divided farm lands, 

 such writers as Edward Atkinson are pointing to the utility 

 of barb wire as cheap and available in protecting the crops 

 of the new and small farmers, helping the raising of cotton 

 and the breeding of sheep ; and sheep-breeders, everywhere, 

 are beginning to study how the barb may antidote the sheep- 

 killing dog and bring back sheep-raising to regions whence 

 the mutton-loving canines long ago banished or impover- 

 ished it. 



Barb wire is rapidly doing away with the system of free 

 ranges in the great open regions of the South-west and 

 the interior, and on the Pacific slope, where, not long ago, 

 fencing was not dreamed of as possible. The owner of 

 thousands of acres of grazing land fences his possessions with 

 barb wire. In New Mexico a pasture of seven hundred 

 thousand acres is enclosed Avith barb wire. In Nueces 

 County, Texas, there are eighty thousand acres in one vast 

 pasture. In the Ozark region of Missouri thirty thousand 

 acres are being similarly enclosed for a sheep farm. Lines 

 of barb fencing from ten to twentv miles in length are not 



