Tuberculosis. 469 



Several American States forbid compensation to the owner for 

 any animal affected with the contagious disease charged. All 

 history attests, and any consideration of human nature might 

 teach, that such a measure is only calculated to spread the in- 

 fection. The owner of an animal, affected with a contagious 

 disease, who can get little salvage by turning it into beef, and 

 none at all if he hands it over to the State for slaughter, will 

 naturally think of putting it on the market, where he can 

 secure a good price. How much more is he tempted to do 

 this when the disease is an occult one, and the animals show 

 the outward appearance of health, as is the case in nine- tenths 

 of many tuberculous herds ! Crime cannot be fixed on the 

 seller, for he is not an expert, and cannot be expected to di- 

 agnose the disease. If the infected cow is of little value for the 

 dairy, she is passed on, from hand to hand, leaving infection in 

 ■every herd she has entered. The ultimate owner (in whose 

 hands the State finds her and diagnoses her disease), though he 

 may have bought her in good faith as a sound animal and paid a 

 •correspondingly high market price, is made to lose the whole 

 value of the cow. The real offender who knew her to be a tuber- 

 culous animal, and sold her in consequence at the price of a sound 

 cow is shrewd enough to keep himself out of the clutches of the 

 law, while the honest purchaser who has been already swindled, 

 has his income and property cut ofE without compensation. Such 

 a law is self-evidently unjust ; it plays into the hands of the 

 swindler at the expense of the just man ; with the object of pro- 

 tecting the community against infection, it refuses to call on the 

 public for any contribution toward its own protection. The 

 system is a direct bid for extensive and encreasing violation of 

 the law and diffusion of the infection and must be accorded a 

 prominent place in the list of causes. It would be surprising to 

 £nd that any country ever extirpated an animal plague by working 

 on such a system. As a matter of fact no country ever did ; all 

 .such sanitary successes from the extinction of sheeppox or rinder- 

 pest in Western Europe, to the recent stamping out of lung plague 

 in the United States, were based on a just compensation to the 

 -owners of the stock. When, therefore, veterinary sanitary 

 -principles and experience have been so far ignored as to allow the 

 passage of a law, which at once favors the diffusion of infection 



