القرن التاسع عشر ، رقم ١٨٢، أبريل ١٨٩٢ [و‎‎٤‎٦] (٢٤٤/٩٦)

1892
VEGETABLE
581
own boys in the slaughter-houses to kill the cattle. These boys were
often unskilful 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-rfountains 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 dreamt 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, waiting 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 resV'Tuof 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 authenti
cated 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 4
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 sheep, 15,180 pigs; but
of this number 3,140 oxen, 5,915 sheep, and 2,943 pigs were cast into