Texas and other Southern States suffered for years losses of
millions in the cattle industry from a type of splenic fever,
commonly called Texas fever. Finally, this fever began to be
carried into the North by Southern cattle shipped there, with
the result that rigid quarantines were established against
the South, which practically put the Southern cattle men out
of business for a large part of each year, and caused still
further enormous losses. Furthermore, this fever prevented the
importation into the far Southern States of fine breeds of
cattle with which to breed up the poor-grade herds. In Texas
practically every fine bull or cow imported from the North
contracted this fever, and seventy-five per cent of them died.
The experts of the Department of Agriculture, working with the
professors of the University of Missouri and of the Agricultural
College of Texas, discovered that this fever was transmitted
solely through the cattle-tick, which carried the germs from
sick cattle and implanted them in well cattle when sucking
their blood. An economical method of ridding cattle of ticks
before shipping, by a process of dipping, removed all danger
to Northern cattle from Southern shipments, and the costly
quarantine handicap was removed or greatly mitigated.
In the past three years a practical and economical method of
entirely exterminating these ticks has been worked out and
tested by our scientists, and the ticks have already been
exterminated over nearly 64,000 square miles, an area larger
than the State of Georgia, and it is only a matter of a few
years and wider diffusion of education when the cattle-tick
will be entirely exterminated. When we consider that the losses
of all kinds from cattle-ticks in the South and Southwest
were estimated at $40,000,000 per year, we can see what these
scientific discoveries mean for us.--New York _Evening
Post_.
(1004)