i 9 4 



DEHORNING CATTLE. 



E. E. Garfield, La Fox, 111.: 



Mr. President ^ Ladies and Gentlemen: Having been reared 

 upon a farm, and having been elected and duly installed as the 

 cowboy of the family, at the age of ten, the writer's attention 

 was early drawn to the cruelties and dangers arising from the 

 presence of horns upon domestic neat cattle. 



The impressions caught from the sympathies and fears of 

 the boy, have neither been obliterated nor allayed by the ex- 

 periences of the man. What, with being often called upon to 

 save the life of a valuable cow from being an unwilling sacrifice 

 to the whims and caprices of her playful sisters, with seeing 

 one brother nearly stripped of his clothing by the careless toss 

 of a bull's horns: another escaping goring by an excited cow 

 only by reason that nature through the agency of an extremely 

 cold winter had dehorned her, if more evidence were needed to 

 convince him of the worse than uselessness of horns aforesaid, 

 it was duly presented in a little discussion which the writer 

 himself once held with a sportive bull, alone upon the prairie. 



The argument was " short, sharp and decisive." The re- 

 sult was such that he has never, since the occasion mentioned, 

 been known to dispute the physical superiority of a pair of 

 " short horns," backed by twelve hundred pounds of beef, to one 

 hundred and sixty of ''adipose tissue" in the human form. 

 From the stand-point of previous experience he was prepared 

 to hail with delight the information received from an article in 

 the Western Rural and Stockman from the pen of Mr. H. H. 

 Haaf to the effect that horns could be safely and easily removed 

 from the cattle of all ages with no serious liability to ill results 

 arising therefrom. 



The resolution to experiment once formed, a pressing occa- 

 sion soon followed. 



A vicious bull was roped and quickly despoiled of his 

 offending members. Ill results noted — none. Good results — a 

 quietus for some months of the fighting propensities of the bull 



