104 A.NIMALS AND THEIR PRODUCTS. 



higher motive for using tliem well. God has made them 

 sensitive beings, capable of gratitude and of resentment, 

 of great enjoyment and of intense suffering. The gift 

 of them, as such, to man. implies that they are to be 

 treated kindly. He who treats them otherwise offends 

 his Maker. To inflict needless pain upon a brute, or to 

 make him less a creature of enjoyment than he is ca- 

 pable of being, consistently with our own interest, is, 

 to say the least, to be brutish. High moral obliga- 

 tion concurs with our own interest, in requiring at our 

 hand a considerate, judicious, kind treatment of do- 

 mestic animals. 



188. We should be observant of the habits of those 

 animals, and attentive to their wants. If you see a 

 cow gnawing a bone, you may depend upon it, a sharp 

 necessity impels her to it; you have drawn phos- 

 phate of lime from her system in milk till she feels an 

 indescribable longing for that substance. She at least 

 cannot describe it, except by the action of trying hour 

 after hour to masticate a bone. It is probably a feel- 

 ing, or rather a want, not unlike that of the drunkard, 

 when the state of his system is such that he would al- 

 most barter soul and body for a taste of spirit. There 

 is reason to believe that milch cows are often great 

 sufferers, when kept in old worn-out pastures, for the 

 want of phosphate of lime. It should be given to 

 them in the form of bone-dust. If a cow or an ox is 

 seen licking the ground, it indicates a want of some- 

 thing (in most cases salt), which should be given in a 

 more eatable form. So there are a thousand indica- 

 tions, which the attentive farmer will observe ; and 



