66 
The Early Fattening of Cattle and Sheep. 
having taken no account of the quality of the meat, and having 
taught nothing as to food rations. Still, we have stumbled upon 
the very useful information that young animals yield — if pro- 
perly fed — a much larger proportion of lean meat than old ones, 
and that before either sheep or cattle have reached the period 
of their earliest maturity they should cease to be eligible for ex- 
hibition as fat animals. 
Such additions to knowledge have affected the stock-feeding 
of the whole country. Except in the case of mountain sheep, and 
of cattle equally slow, the ripe three-year-old wethers and oxen of 
the old school are no longer met with at market. Quite re- 
cently, the fat-stock clubs have been compelled to re-cast their 
prize lists, so as to meet the requirements of the times. The 
Smithfield Club admitted lambs to the competitive classes in 
1875, and on several subsequent occasions the champion prize 
offered for the best pen of three sheep of any class has been 
won by lambs — in 1884, by Southdown lambs which, at ten 
months old, had gained -61 lb. a day, or 183 lb. of live weight, 
yielding probably 60 per cent, of carcass, or 13 stone 5 lb. each. 
Mr. de Mornay's three Hampshire prize-winning lambs in 1877 
weighed, when dead, 17^ stone each; and one of his lambs has 
scaled, when dead, 18£ stone at ten months old. The same Club 
established young classes for bullocks in 1880, having pre- 
viously, in 1870, restricted the champion prize for sheep to one- 
year-old sheep, i.e. under twenty-three months in December. 
The old-fashioned notion was that an animal must have 
completed its growth before it could be profitably fattened. At 
the present time, all the improved breeds rival one another in re- 
gard to the early period at which they may be fattened. But for 
this claim, the Sussex cattle would not have emerged from their 
local obscurity in the depths of the Weald, nor would the Here- 
ford have been found abreast with the Shorthorn upon the 
ranches of the Far West ; while even that broad-backed beef- 
making bullock the Polled Aberdeen has come to the front as 
a quick feeder. 
It was long maintained by some theorists that as the term 
maturity could have only one meaning — namely, complete develop- 
ment — the shortest period of time in which that result could be 
attained was the object to be aimed at. " No bovine animal," 
it was said, ' : could attain its full natural growth and develop- 
ment in two years ; and the question remains to be demonstrated 
whether an animal fed generouslyand judiciously from birth would 
not pay better to sell in its real maturity at, say, thirty months 
old, rather than as forced 'baby beef at twenty months old." 
This was a problem which stock-feeders in England have 
