CEYLON. 655 



CETLOIf. 



CATTLE OF CEYLON. 



UEPORT BY CONSUL MOBET. 

 DIFFICULTIES WHICH BESET CATTLE-BEEEDING IN CEYLON. 



The materials for a report upon the cattle of Ceylon are very meager. 

 The climate of the low country is too humid and the pasturage too 

 poor for the vigorous support of the large animals sometimes imported 

 from Europe, Australia, and the hill districts of India, nor can they be 

 said to thrive greatly in the more elevated region, for even there the 

 natural grasses are neither nutritious nor wholesome, and if these spe- 

 cies of cattle are not largely fed on grain or roots they fall off in condi- 

 tion and die early, having in the meantime produced a degenerate pro- 

 geny. 



I have it on the authority of a European lady, who has a taste for 

 the breeding of improved cattle, and who has expended large sum| of 

 money and much time and attention in that direction, that her early ef- 

 forts in Nuwar Eliya, which is the sanitarium of Ceylon and over 6,000 

 feet above sea-level, were very disappointing, in consequence of her 

 best animals often dying of intestinal complaints. Post-mortems finally 

 disclosed the fact that much of the grass they had consumed was so 

 hard and wiry that it had resisted digestion and remained in the animal 

 in the form of large fibrous balls, which completely stopped intestinal 

 operations and caused death. 



The plan finally adopted by this persevering lady to preserve alive 

 such of her surplus stock, principally cows out of milk and youngsters, 

 as it was impracticable to keep stall-fed, was to send them down to 

 Pussellawa, to a coffee estate about 3,000 feet above sea-level, where 

 they were fed on cultivated grass, for the sake of their manure, and 

 thus the stock was for a considerable time kept in fairly good condition. 

 Eventually, however, the said coffee estate went under different man- 

 agement, when, owing either to a neglect about cultivating the grass or 

 to not feeding it to the cattle, those poor brutes were, to my knowledge, 

 soon reduced to a most pitiable state of starvation, from which it proved 

 impossible to recover them, and the moiety if not the whole of that choice 

 herd is now extinct. 



Most other people's attempts at rearing improved stock here have 

 resulted about the same, and, although there are in the central prov- 

 ince, where most of these operations were carried on, some very nice 

 stock of mixed parentage, still it has been reared at a cost far beyond 

 its value, and if not kept up by fresh importations of new blood from 

 abroad, will probably degenerate and run out in the course of another 

 decade. It also seems to be very difficult to improve the common Sin- 

 ghalese cattle by crossing them with foreigners (see Plate 1); for what- 

 ever the present improvement, principally in size, may be, such progeny 

 are generally wanting in hardiness, and crosses likely to work an im- 

 provement in this respect are difftcult of accomplishment. Some beau- 

 tiful bulls of the Amrat Mahal (Milk Palace) breed, which I imported 



