ON CRUELTY TO HOUSES. 
457 
a point which well deserves the most careful attention of the 
veterinary surgeon. The accounts of the extent to which puerperal 
fever has been unconsciously communicated to his patients by 
the human practitioner are most appalling. 
That there is a constitutional tendency to this complaint 
cannot be denied. Beasts in high condition are peculiarly 
subject to it; and an animal that has once experienced an attack 
of it is rendered more liable to the disease than she otherwise 
would have been at the next or some future calving. Agricultu¬ 
ralists are perfectly aware of this; for if a cow recovers from milk 
fever, she is fattened and sold as soon as her milk is dried. 
Something may be and is done by many graziers in the way 
of prevention. If the cow is in a high or dangerous state of 
condition, and has been fed on luxuriant pasture, it will be very 
proper to bleed her, and give her a dose of physic, and remove her 
to a field of much shorter bite, a few days before her expected time 
of calving. I believe that many valuable animals have been 
saved by this precaution. 
ON CRUELTY TO HORSES. 
By L. Gompertz, Esq . 
To the Editors of 
u 
The Veterinarian 
I felt some surprize while happening to turn over the pages of 
a publication called “ The Hippiatrist,” at finding a transcript 
of an incorrect report in the Morning Herald of a prosecution 
instituted by me at Bow Street, which the author of the Hippia- 
trist thought proper to preface with some scurrilous observations 
of his own upon myself, and upon the society I have the honour 
to belong to, but by which it is well known I am not employed , 
as the author falsely asserts me to be. He begins with the very 
necessary precaution of telling his readers that he is not “an ad¬ 
vocate for severity and his pretensions to humanity opportunely 
succeed an article which, were it not for this information, might 
have induced a quite opposite belief, however discordant with 
his profession of alleviating the sufferings of the horse, by 
which noble animal he lives, and which by every good feeling he 
would be induced to protect. He says that he copies the article 
“from an old work on horsemanship, evidently the result of 
much experience in the modes of treating horses and the art it 
professes to teach. ” “Wc arc not, however/’ says he, “advocates 
