352 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [1 May, 1902. 
PIG NOTES. 
Don’t keep the boar over fat. We have never yet seen a 
at the shows that was in fit condition to be used for breeding. 
Cleanliness is as necessary for the health and well-being of pigs as for 
other animals. Foul quarters are a direct invitation to disease. 
The practice of so many farmers in different communities being satisfied 
with anything they have on the farm, and using any boar that is most 
convenient, is not to be commended. 
Give pregnant sows laxative food, and they will not eat their pigs. This 
disease is caused by being in a feverish condition. Give such a sow meal and 
bran slops, in which put a } lb. of Epsom salts each day. 
Tf you must have a swill barrel to take the waste from the houses for the 
pigs, have two, and see that one is emptied, and has a little chance to sweeten 
up while the contents of the other are being used. 
When your pigs are heavy enough and fat enough for market, sell, It is 
expensive feeding after that, the gain not being commensurate with the food 
consumed, and there is always the possibility of a fall in price. 
The village pig-feeder usually succeeds well, and why? Because in 
gathering slop at his neighbours’ kitchen doors he gets a variety of foods just 
in the line of the pig’s taste. The farmer notes that those pigs most always 
look thrifty, no difference how filthy their surroundings. The explanation of 
their thrift lies wholly in the fact that they have a variety of food. Give them 
all one kind, as the farmer often does, and they would soon become the meanest 
looking specimens imaginable. 
In the attempt to get pigs of small bone and rapid growth there is danger 
of going too far, and getting those whose small bones and joints will not hold 
up even the lighter weights now considered desirable. It may prove better to 
choose one of the parents, and preferably the sow, of a coarser-boned type, and 
the male finer boned, with possibly an alteration once in a few years, but 
keeping in view the object of small bones and early maturity as far as possible 
without weakening any part. There has been but little scientific breeding of 
swine, but haphazard crosses, with the object, when there was any definite 
object thought of, of getting the largest weight and fattest meat possible. Now 
that the demand has changed to lighter weights, and science has proven that 
early fattening is less expensive than slower growth and longer feeding, we 
find there are many things about it that we have not learned and cannot find in 
the textbooks.—Awstralian Farm and Home. 
73 
show animal” 
THE DAIRY COW AND THE WEATHER. 
From the University of Arizona (U.S.A.) Agricultural Experiment Station 
is being issued a series of ‘‘ Timely Hints for Farmers.” Amongst these is an 
article by Gordon H. True, under the above heading, which we reproduce for 
the benefit of Queensland dairymen. It reads as follows :— 
The relation of the comfort of the cow to the cash received by her owner 
for her products is one that every dairyman should study with much interest. 
Those conditions—enough good food and pure water, shelter from the heat of 
summer and storms of winter, and kind treatment—are just the conditions man 
demands for his own comfort, and just what would be due every animal from 
every owner, for humanity’s sake, even were there no business relations between. 
them. 
Those who read the twelfth annual report of the station may remember 
the effect of storm upon the production of butter fat by the cows of the station 
herd. 
In thinking the matter over, the query comes to us: What is the effect of 
the various conditions of weather upon the animal anyway? ‘The body of the 
cow, which is a complicated piece of mechanism, is so constructed as to do its 
as 
