262 TYPE OF AMERICAN SHEEP DISEASES. 



To correct or confirm my own impressions on this 

 subject, I addressed letters, a few months since, to a large 

 number of highly intelligent and experienced flock-masters 

 residing in various States, and in situations differing widely 

 in respect to climate, soil, elevation, etc. — asking them what 

 diseases sheep were subject to iu their respective regions, and 

 what remedies were most successfully employed for their cure. 

 The spirit and substance of nearly aU the replies are contained 

 in the following extract from a letter of my off-hand friend, 

 Mr. Theodore C. Peters, of Darien, New York : 



" You ask me for our sheep diseases and for the remedies. 

 After years of experience I discarded all medicines except 

 those to cure hoof-rot and scab ; and I finally cured those 

 diseases cheapest by selling the sheep. An ounce of preven- 

 tion is worth a poimd of cure. If sheep are well kept 

 summer and winter, not over-crowded in pastures, and kept 

 tinder dry and well ventilated covers in winter, and housed 

 when the cold, fall rains come on, there wUl be no necessity 

 for remedies of any kind. If not so handled, aU the remedies 

 in the world won't help them, and the sooner a careless, 

 shiftless man loses his sheep the better. They are out of their 

 misery and are not spreading contagious diseases among the 

 neighboring fiocks." 



When to the two maladies above named, (hoof-rot and 

 scab,) are added the obscure one described at page 204, a 

 very fatal but infrequent one in the spring, ordinarily termed 

 grub-in-the-head, catarrh or cold, colic, parturient fever, (the 

 last quite rare and mostly confined to English sheep,) and the 

 few minor diseases 43lf sheep and lambs mentioned under the 

 heads of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter Management — 

 we have almost the entire list with which the American sheep 

 farmer is familiar. All the diseases named do not, in my 

 opinion, cut off annually two per cent, of well fed and really 

 well managed grown sheep ! Nothing is more common than 

 for years to pass by in the small flocks of our careful breeders, 

 with scarcely a solitary instance of disease in them. I 

 have not space to offer any conjectures as to the causes of an 

 immunity fupm disease so remarkable, in comparison with the 

 condition of England, Prance and Germany, in the same 

 particular. 



Low Type of Amekican Sheep Diseases. — A discrimi- 

 nating English veterinary writer, Mr. Spooner, has remarked 

 that owing to its greatly wjsaker muscular and vascular 



