Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/106

98 have his own boys in the slaughter-houses to kill the cattle. These boys were often unskillful or not strong enough. When the beautiful milk-white oxen, with their large, pathetic black eyes, were brought to be slaughtered, these butcher boys had often to give thirty blows before the poor beast fell. Every animal that was brought into the town paid by weight at the octroi, but they were generally kept waiting for days in sheds outside the town. In these sheds there were drinking-fountains always running, but the plug at the bottom was taken out, so as to prevent the animals from drinking, and thus their weight was lightened. The railway companies never dreamed of watering the cattle during the many days that they were packed together in the trucks, sweltering and faint under the fierce Italian sun. The Roman Society for Protection of Animals sent a dozen pails to Foligno, a central railway station, offering to pay a certain sum annually for the watering of the cattle. The pails were returned after two years, never having been used once. Nor are things much better in this country. The cattle which come up from Transylvania and other distant parts of the empire are neither fed nor watered on the journey, which sometimes takes a week. Then when unshipped they are tied together in threes and fours, hit and frightened, and thus driven to the slaughter-houses. They sometimes fall down in the road from terror and exhaustion.

Galician pigs often lie in thousands for a week together in the snow and slush outside the slaughter-houses, waitiug to be killed. Thus far my own experience and things I have seen. In England, if I am to believe newspaper paragraphs and statistics, things are as bad if not worse. For a short résumé of the horrors attending the transport of cattle by land and by sea, let anybody whom it interests turn to pages 65-69 of Dr. A. Kingsford's Perfect Way in Diet, headed The Sufferings of Cattle, and they will learn well-authenticated facts which will fill them with pain and disgust. The following figures are sufficiently significant. They are taken from the report of the Veterinary Department of the Privy Council for the year 1879.

In 1879, 157 cargoes of Canadian cattle were shipped for Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London, in which total there were 25,185 oxen, 73,913 sheep, and 3,663 pigs; but of this number 154 oxen, 1,623 sheep, and 249 pigs were thrown into the sea during the passage, 21 oxen, 226 sheep, and 3 pigs were landed dead, and 1 oxen and 61 sheep were so wounded and suffering on arriving that they had to be slaughtered on the spot. In the same year there were shipped from the United States for the ports of Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Grimsby, Hartlepool, Hull, Leith, Liverpool, London, Newcastle-on-Tyne, South Shields, and Southampton 535 cargoes of animals, of which 76,117 were oxen, 119,350