THE OX IN LIFE AND DEATH 117 



not refuse her milk to ours. True we teach those children 

 of ours to say perfunctorily: — 



" Thank you, pretty cow, who gives us pleasant milk," 

 but we do not realise the wail that would go up from the 

 land, the glory that would depart from our homes, if our 

 sucking babes were left to the unaided mercies of their 

 mothers. 



Yes ! Women, of all creatures alive, should be grateful 

 to the cow who makes motherhood possible for them. All 

 the more grateful because in supplying their place, as milch 

 kine have done increasingly year by year, somewhat of the 

 pains and penances of human child-bearing have come upon 

 these dumb creatures. 



Ready — unnaturally ready — to breed at all times, they 

 often suffer, as women suffer in child-bearing, while the 

 very excess of their milk production which enables many a 

 human suckling to thrive on one cow, has produced for 

 them a disease which yearly kills an increasing number of 

 good milk kine. The mother who, kept for breeding pur- 

 poses only, rears her calf naturally, knows it not. It is the 

 heavy milkers who, in obedience to the needs of man, give 

 twice, three times, nay ! five or six times more milk than 

 any calf would require who suffer from puerperal apoplexy 

 and die — happily unconscious. 



Then as beasts of burden the ox still claims our grateful 

 care. To it even we of the civilised world fly when roads 

 are bad, when all else fails. In South Africa alone, how 

 many victories were won by the patient creatures who 

 harnessed to guns, to ammunition waggons, to stores, heaved 

 and strained through the veldts, through the drifts, only to 

 be shot at night time if their galled shoulders seemed too 



