224 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



back-country ranges the losses were far heavier. Sheep 

 and cattle were found dead in hundreds along the fences, 

 where they had mistakenly gone for shelter. In all, 

 half-a-million sheep were lost.* (In her later volume 

 the numbers are much reduced.) 



Hardly less destructive than drought, and often en- 

 demic where drought is only epidemic at long intervals, 

 is the sheep-breeder's deadly enemy, scab. A French 

 philosopher has ingeniously hazarded the view that the 

 invasion of human beings, as of the animals he domesti- 

 cates, by myriads of parasites, embodies the revenge of 

 the lower species against the higher for dispossessing 

 them of the Earth. It is a questionable theory, but the 

 exasperated pastoralist, harassed on all sides, would 

 perhaps have found consolation in it. Scab was doubt- 

 less the worst of the diseases that make sheep-farming 

 precarious. It annually carried off large numbers of 

 sheep, which at times died by hundreds and thousands, 

 or were boiled down for tallow, when the poor pioneer 

 was almost a ruined man again. It was a dread word, 

 which spelled ruin and heavy loss, endless torment, 

 death, and destruction. The straying of a single sheep, 

 due to a careless or malignant station-employee, might 

 introduce the ovine leprosy and undo all that had been 

 done to obviate it. One's neighbour was often then 

 one's natural enemy. If he were a careless flockholder, 

 he might ruin your flocks. There were, of course, 

 remedies for the disease. A late judge of the Supreme 

 Court in New Zealand, himself an ex-runholder, used to 

 relate how he cured a flock of scab-smitten animals 

 with tobacco-juice ; a former legislator, at the other end 

 of the same colony used to trumpet the virtues of his 

 famous dip. But most remedies were ineffectual. 



The foot-disease comes next in destructiveness. It 

 first showed itself in cattle, and next in sheep, in the 

 year 1803, It disappeared with the drought, and, for 

 almost three-quarters of a century, it was virtually un- 

 known. Then it again became afresh formidable as the 

 * Station Life, Letter xx. 



