278 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FARM 



shuns it, strikes at it, and seeks to drive it away. One may 

 often see the eggs attached singly to the hairs — little oblong 

 whitish specks, glued fast, to remain during incubation. If 

 licked off and swallowed in ten to fifteen days after they are 

 laid, they may develop into parasitic larvae" in the horse's 

 stomach. They then remain attached to the walls of the 

 stomach or intestine, during their larval life. The swiftly- 

 flying, loudly-buzzing, terror-inspiring bot-fly darts about 

 the horse's forelegs like a golden bee. 



These are the worst of the fly pests: but there are many 

 others; horse-flies and stable-flies and house-flies and minute 

 punkies, some of which bite, and some of which lap up 

 exudations from the skin, and some of which merely perch 

 and tickle, causing but slight annoyance to the beasts. 



Cattle and horses are specially equipped for dealing with 

 such pests. They have an abundant development of small 

 subcutaneous muscles for shaking them off from the skin, 

 and thus temporarily disposing of them with a minimum 

 expenditure of energy; and their tails are equipped with 

 heavy brushes of long coarse hair, indestructible fly -brushes, 

 which they swing with considerable force and precision. 

 One often learns this while engaged in milking the family 

 cow. One of the most inane "improvements" that ever 

 became fashionable is the docking of the tails of horses. It 

 is a mild form of cruelty to animals ; for it deprives them of 

 their natural means of defense against the flies. In any 

 pasture on a summer day, one may see the horses standing 

 in the shade in pairs, side by side, head to tail, each one's 

 tail switching the front of the other, each one's front being 

 switched by the tail of the other; it is a mutual -benefit 

 association, the efficiency of which lies in the possession of 

 natural full-length fly-brushes. 



Small as these pests are, they are capable of causing very 

 great annoyance. Cows give less milk in fly-time, and horses 



