PL A G UE-STR UCK ANIMALS 1 2 1 



in some cases twenty years, with fish-bones, broken 

 victuals, and other filth/ and impregnated with liquid 

 nastiness. But though chicken-cholera and other 

 epidemics of poultry are mainly due to unwholesome 

 surroundings, the life of most domestic animals, especi- 

 ally cattle, and of all wild animals, such as antelopes 

 and the wild bovines, is exceptionally healthy. Except 

 in famine years, there is no predisposing cause to make 

 them succumb to pestilence as they do. Even when un- 

 tended, so that the separation of infected animals is im- 

 possible, or when wild, such cattle or deer separate them- 

 selves by instinct from the herd and remain alone. Isola- 

 tion is voluntary. What should prove another great 

 factor in protecting animal life in epidemics is the absence 

 of those nervous terrors which always predispose human 

 beings to infection, and often cause death itself by the 

 mere horror of anticipation. Fear, contrition, religious 

 mania, despondency, grief, despair, drink and delirium, 

 and the break-up of the normal social order, swelled 

 the list of human deaths in the epidemics of the Middle 

 Ages, and some of these factors aggravate the incidence 

 of every great plague among mankind. It is not so 

 with animals. Their naturally healthy frames are 

 impaired by no nervous terrors or morbid mental affec- 

 tions in the presence of disease. Though some of the 

 more intelligent are distressed at the deaths of their 

 masters, they exhibit great indifference to wholesale 



