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—iittle 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 
