Breeding, Rearing, and Feeding Horses, Cattle, and She3p. 9 
The 263,698 bulls, cows, oxen, and calves, which came from 
foreign countries in 1875, were supposed to weigh 4J cwt. each, 
which gave 1,186,641 cwt. in meat. The 977,863 sheep were 
calculated at 13 lbs. per quarter, which represented 454,007 cwt.. 
Then, from 71,928 live pigs, as many cwt. were relied on. 
Thus we had 1,712,576 cwt. of meat from abroad in the form 
of live cattle, sheep, and pigs in 1875, which amounts to nearly 
6 per cent, of the food consumed, excluding ham, bacon, pork, 
and cured beef. The latter, or dead meat, represent about' 8 per 
cent, of the total consumption. 
No allowance was made for the number of calves dropped in 
early spring, and fed off as veal, before the enumeration takes 
place ; nor were the lambs which are turned into the fat market 
before the 25th of June taken into account. No deduction, how- 
ever, was made for loss of beef or mutton by disease and death ; 
but the lamb and veal would, roughly speaking, meet any 
deficiency of this sort. Of course, many pigs live longer than 
twelve months ; but there are also a large number killed under 
eight months which have never been enumerated, so that I am 
inclined to think that the whole number returned does not repre- 
sent the actual head of pigs annually slaughtered. The average 
weight of 10 imperial stone, however, may be rather high. It 
was assumed also that all the foreign cattle were for slaughter. 
That is not quite the case ; but the number of them enumerated 
in the British returns is infinitesimal. 
The total of 33,697,783 cwt. of beef, mutton, pork, hams, 
and bacon represented as consumed annually in the United 
Kingdom, amounts to about 114 lbs. to each man, woman, and 
child in the United Kingdom — that is, estimating the population 
at 33,000,000. If the quantities of poultry, of fish, of game, and 
rabbits annually eaten are taken into consideration, in addition 
to the above, it will be seen that in a large degree we are an 
animal-food consuming community. 
In order to obtain the opinions and experience of leading prac- 
tical men throughout the United Kingdom on a subject of such, 
vast importance, I issued, with the editor's approval, a series of 
queries to gentlemen resident in various parts of England, Scot- 
land, and Ireland. The queries were addressed to, and replies 
solicited from, gentlemen who were known to have had extensive 
experience, and whose opinions on such matters generally com- 
mand respect and often also approval. From more than one- 
half the number applied to no replies have been received, which 
is perhaps not surprising, considering the difficulty of giving 
comprehensive and definite answers to such questions, and the 
well-known disinclination of many of the best practical farmers 
o put their views on paper The questions were framed with v 
