Of one thing I am very careful, and that is, not to allow the inflowing
milk, previous to calving, to harden in the udder, and in all my long
experience, in owning cows, I have never had a case of garget. When I was
a boy about twelve years of age, my father purchased a very large milker
for those days. I noticed that the right hind quarter of her udder was
much smaller than the other, and yielded a correspondingly less quantity
of milk. After she had been dried off, and the time approached for her to
calve, I observed that this same quarter of her udder became very much
more distended than the others. Her whole udder was very much distended,
but this quarter excessively so. As her period of calving was delayed,
and her udder became more inflamed, producing, evidently, great pain to
the cow, I asked the privilege of milking her, and was denied. At the
same time I was given to understand that it was the worst possible thing
that could be done for the cow; that it was necessary that her udder
should become thus distended, in order to give it the capacity to contain
the flow of milk after calving; that should she be milked before calving,
the yield after calving would be very much lessened, etc. By the time she
calved, her udder was one indurated mass, and that particular quarter of
it so much inflamed that she could not bear to have the calf touch it.
In the course of time, however, by copious applications of cold water,
and various liniments, the inflammation was reduced, but that particular
section of the udder, which had been sufficiently distended to hold
her whole yield, was shrunken to its old dimensions, and was no larger
than when I first saw her. When the time approached for her to drop her
next calf, I took the responsibility of clandestinely milking her, so
that when she calved there was no inflamed udder, there was no fussing
with liniments. Its four quarters were now evenly developed; the only
difference was the former shrunken quarter was larger, if anything, than
the others, and, throughout the season, the yield of milk, from the same
keeping, was essentially increased over the yield of the previous year. I
never disclosed the secret, however, until I was grown up. But I acquired
a very useful lesson which I applied in my practice long before the
theory that it was best to milk a cow previous to calving was generally
adopted by owners around me.