296 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



12. It is a vain attempt to eradicate a disease by removing the 

 effects while leaving the proximate cause, unsanitary conditions and 

 harmful methods, in full operation. The last germ could not be caught 

 and destroyed without altering the entire plan of creation. 



The great dairy and stock feeding industry of the state requires for 

 its successful prosecution a large amount of raw material in the shape 

 of imported living cattle. For this reason the universal quarantine 

 against the cattle of the outside world bears most heavily upon the in- 

 dustry here. Such quarantine can only be justified on the ground of 

 stern necessity for the protection of private property and the public 

 health. But if it be true as claimed that but few, if any, have been 

 condemned as tuberculous out of the thousands of imported cattle that 

 have been tested with tuberculin, it would indicate a remarkable health- 

 condition of live stock in those regions that furnish the supply. This 

 importation, then, would be a source of purification and not of infection, 

 if it could come in "pure. and undefiled" by tuberculin. But it is a grave 

 question whether the injection of tuberculin into the blood of every 

 animal (without which they cannot come in) may not itself l>e danger- 

 ous to the public health. The large herds of the Fox River Valley and 

 the entire milk shipping district where cows are crowded to their full 

 capacity every day in the year, require a constant supply of fresh mater- 

 ial to maintain the health and efhcienty of the dairy. This supply for 

 cow-consumers comes from cov/-producing sections with small herds, 

 kept largely in the open air,, where tuberculosis in cattle is seldom or 

 never found. To shut off the fountains that supply a living stream is 

 to leave it to pollution and decay. It is suggested that quarantine be 

 restricted to regions known to be affected with some dangerously con- 

 tagious disease. 



We believe that the State Board of Live Stock Commissioners are 

 acting under a wrong interpretation of the statute: First, in regarding 

 tuberculosis in cattle as a "dangerously contagious or infectious dis- 

 ease" of a character that would justify the destruction of private property 

 without fair compensation to the owner; and second, in adopting a slid- 



