Domestic Animals: History and description of the horse, mule, cattle, sheep, swine, poultry and farm dogs; with directions for their management, breeding, crossing, rearing, feeding, and preparation for a profitable market; also their diseases and remedies. Together with full directions for the management of the dairy.Allen, Richard Lamb
Science
Domestic Animals: History and description of the horse, mule, cattle, sheep, swine, poultry and farm dogs; with directions for their management, breeding, crossing, rearing, feeding, and preparation for a profitable market; also their diseases and remedies. Together with full directions for the management of the dairy.
Allen, Richard Lamb
Domestic animals
From the last-mentioned principle, founded on long experience and
observation, Cline inferred, and he has laid it down as an
incontrovertible position, that the lungs should always be large; and
Youatt expresses the same opinion. This is undoubtedly correct as to
working beasts, the horse and the ox, which require full and free
respiration, to enable them to sustain great muscular efforts. But later
physiologists have assumed, perhaps from closer and more accurate
observations, that the fattening propensity is in the ratio of the
smallness of the lungs. Earl Spencer has observed, that this is fully
shown in the pig, the sheep, the ox, and the horse, whose aptitude to
fatten and smallness of lungs, are in the order enumerated.
This position is further illustrated by the different breeds of the same
classes of animals. The Leicester sheep have smaller lungs than the
South Down; and it has been found, that a number of the former, on a
given quantity of food, and in the same time, reached 28 lbs. a quarter,
while the South Downs with a greater consumption of food, attained in
the same period, only 18 lbs. The Chinese pigs have much smaller lungs
than the Irish, and the former will fatten to a given weight, on a much
less quantity of food than the latter. (_Playfair._) The principle would
seem to be corroborated by the fact, that animals generally fatten
faster in proportion to the quantity of food they consume, as they
advance towards a certain stage of maturity; during all which time, the
secretion of internal fat is gradually compressing the size, by reducing
the room for the action of the lungs. Hence, the advantage of carrying
the fattening beast to an advanced point, by which not only the quality
of carcass is improved, but the quantity is relatively greater for the
amount of food consumed. These views are intimately connected, and fully
correspond, with the principles of
RESPIRATION IN ANIMALS.
From careful experiments, it has been found that all animals daily
consume a much larger quantity of food than the aggregate of what may
have been retained in the system, added to what has been expelled in the
f[oe]ces and urine, and what has escaped by perspiration. Boussingault,
who combines the characteristics of an ingenious chemist, a vigilant
observer, and a practical agriculturist, made an experiment with a
"milch-cow and a full-grown horse, which were placed in stalls so
contrived that the droppings and the urine could be collected without
loss. Before being made the subjects of experiment, the animals were
ballasted or fed for a month with the same ration that was furnished to
them, during the three days and three nights which they passed in the
experimental stalls. During the month, the weight of the animals did not
vary sensibly, a circumstance which happily enables us to assume that
neither did the weight vary during the seventy-two hours when they were
under especial observation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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