l)E()PfING AFTER CALVING. 
573 
pathology of the disease, and hence the appropriateness of 
the name, Parturient apoplexy. 
Susceptibility. —No animal of the farm except the cow is 
the subject of the malady, although all are liable to be attacked 
with inflammatory and other diseases at the period of partu¬ 
rition. Even with cows, all are not equally predisposed to 
parturient apoplexy, young being less so than aged. Heifers 
producing their first calf when about two years and a half old 
may be regarded as altogether insusceptible, and the same 
may be said with reference to their second calving, as a rule. 
Succeeding labours, however, are attended with greater 
danger even up to the time that they may be rightly de¬ 
signated old animals. 
Potent for evil as advanced age undoubtedly is, it cannot, 
nevertheless, be affirmed that the oldest animals will be attacked, 
for daily experience proves that many a middle-aged cow will 
fall a victim to the disease, although there are older animals 
in the same herd. The capability of a cow to yield a large 
quantity of milk exercises considerable predisposing in¬ 
fluence, and bad milkers are, as a rule, found to be far less 
susceptible to the disease. As the mammary glands may be 
said to be at their fullest development, if not immediately at 
their greatest activity, at the third calving, so it would appear 
that adultism becomes more dangerous when combined with 
the power to produce a full lacteal secretion at the time of 
parturition. 
Besides this combination, susceptibility is greatly increased 
by breed; well-bred Yorkshire cows and English -bred Jersey 
cows being most susceptible, thriving Suffolk and Ayrshire 
and Dutch cows following in the rear. Well-bred animals 
have, as is well known, an hereditary predisposition to early 
maturity, and even plethora. And although it cannot be said 
that “good milkers” are plethoric animals, still an innate 
tendency, depending on breed, to accumulate flesh, materially 
adds to their susceptibility to be attacked with the disease. 
Generous feeding, more especially if associated with this 
hereditary predisposition, and a capability of yielding a full 
quantity of milk, will necessarily increase this liability. It 
has often been observed that cows of this description, which 
in the latter period of utero-gestation have ceased to give 
milk, and are generously fed, and perhaps allowed to remain 
at pasture in the summer when the rest of the herd are driven 
home for milking, have their susceptibility thereby in¬ 
creased. These several things explain, in part, the well- 
established fact of the disease being prevalent in some districts 
and rarely seen in others. 
1 . 111 . 
39 
