Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/665

Rh Beasts are still made to endure all the horrors to which slavers were once wont to subject their cargoes of human chattels in stifling holds on the notorious "middle passage."

The late Henry Bergh states that the loss on cattle by "shrinkage" in transporting them from the Western to the Eastern portion of the United States is from ten to fifteen per cent. The average shrinkage of an ox is one hundred and twenty pounds, and that of a sheep or hog from fifteen to twenty pounds; and the annual loss in money arising from this cause is estimated at more than forty million dollars. The amount of animal suffering which these statistics imply is fearful to contemplate. Here and there a solitary voice is heard in our legislative halls protesting against the horrors of this traffic, but so powerful is the lobby influence of wealthy corporations that no law can be passed to prevent them. Not a word ever falls from the pulpit in rebuke of such barbarity; meanwhile the railroad magnates pay liberal pew rents out of the profits, and listen with complacency one day in the week to denunciations of Jeroboam's idolatry and the wicked deeds of Ahab and Ahaziah, as recorded in the chronicles of the kings of Israel.

The horse, one of the noblest and most sensitive of domestic animals, is put to all kinds of torture by docking, pricking, clipping, peppering, and the use of bearing reins solely to gratify human vanity. As a reward for severe and faithful toil he is often fed with unwholesome and insufficient fodder on the economical principle announced by the manager of a New York tramway that "horses are cheaper than oats." It is an actual fact, verified by Henry Bergh, that the horses of this large corporation were fed on a mixture of meal, gypsum, and marble dust, until the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals interfered and finally succeeded in putting a stop to the practice.

The Americans, as a people, are notorious for the recklessness with which they squander the products of Nature, of which their country is so exceedingly prolific. This extravagance extends to all departments of public, social, and domestic life. No land less rich in material resources could have borne for any length of time the wretched mismanagement of its finances to which the United States has been subjected ever since and even before the close of the civil war. There is not a government in Europe that would not have been broken down and rendered bankrupt by the tremendous and wholly unnecessary strain put upon it by crass ignorance of the most elementary principles of finance and demagogical tampering with the public credit. The same wasteful spirit involves also, as we have seen, immense suffering to animals on the part of soulless and unscrupulous corporations, in which intense greed of gain is not mitigated by the influence of individual