471 
clater’s cattle doctor. 
terest, to take into due consideration many a circumstance con¬ 
nected with the season and the state of his flock, which would 
never enter into the mind of the looker, but on which the lives of 
the sheep depend. Many a lamb dies for want of a little shelter 
in an inclement season; but many more die when the winter is 
mild, and the spring is early. In the one case they die from 
cold and starvation; in the other, from being in too high condi¬ 
tion, and having too much milk. The looker will go on in the 
same regular way, whatever be the state of the season : it is the 
proprietor alone who will have sufficient consideration to allow 
additional food and shelter in the one case, and in the other to 
stock as hardly as may be, before and during the lambing; to 
suckle, and feed, and shelter the weakly; and to keep back and 
prevent the suckling, and to milk the dam, and to stock hard 
when the lambs are thriving and the weather kindly: these are 
affairs about which the generality of lookers scarcely concern 
themselves, and into which the best of them will not enter so 
anxiously as the master. 
“ The most important circumstance to be attended to at all times, 
and particularly at the lambing season, is shelter,—not confine¬ 
ment, but shelter from the searching north and east wind. There 
should not be a lambing field without a shed in it, or, at least, 
without some place surrounded with brush-wood faggots on the 
north and east sides at least, if not all round, and into which the 
weakly lambs and ewes may be driven, and in stormy weather 
the whole flock may take refuge with manifest advantage. 
“ Next in importance to shelter stands food. The animal may 
be stinted in his growth, and prepared for scab by starvation; 
but he may be inevitably destroyed by over feeding, or sudden 
change of food. The unhealthy seasons for sheep, putting the 
rot for a moment out of the question, are not the winter, when 
no grass grows, nor the summer, when it is all burned up, but 
the spring and the autumn, when there is plenty, and too much 
to eat. They contrive to live, if not to fatten, in the two former 
seasons, but they perish from excess or change of food during the 
latter two. 
“There is one disease, however, which is caught, or the founda¬ 
tion for which is laid in the summer, and that is the rot; but 
from what has been stated with regard to that disease, a proper 
system of husbandry, and attention to little unsuspected but 
most dangerous nooks and corners, would materially limit the 
ravages of this malady. 
“ The grand fault in the management of sheep, and of all do¬ 
mestic animals, is, that the farmer pays so little personal 
attention to them, and pursues one undeviating course, the same 
