Housing of Animals
In country places and in connection with country houses provision has to be made for the proper housing of animals.
Speaking broadly, there can be no doubt that the more fresh air we give our animals (the more they are in the open and the less they are under cover) the better.
Sheep are rarely housed, unless it be with a view to their getting prizes for being in a condition of diseased obesity.
On Mr. Stephens's farm at Cholderton one may see not only sheep, but herds of cattle and numerous brood mares and foals, all in the rudest health, notwithstanding that they never go within doors from year's end to year's end.
It is the same with poultry. If they are to be kept healthy they must be confined indoors as little as possible. 'Who,' says Cobbett, 'can get up as early as the birds?' and it must be remembered that birds are out nearly an hour before sunrise all the year round. If poultry be locked up, with a view to forcing egg-production by keeping them warm, it is probable that they will become tuberculous.
Sir Frederick Fitzwygram, in his exhaustive treatise on the Horse, is very careful to insist on the perfect ventilation of stables, and tells us of certain London cab stables where the health of the horses became excellent after the doors and windows were removed.
In the construction of stables, Sir Frederick Fitzwygram insists on the danger of underground drains, and advises that the drainage of a stable shall be by open gutters only, and that these gutters shall lead to gullies removed many yards from the stable door. This is rational common sense, and must be applied not only to stables, but to human habitations also.
Trapped gullies are only miniature cesspools, and the presence of such contrivances within stables or cow-houses means that the animals are breathing the gases of putrefaction whenever they are within doors.
It is a question whether, in such places, we do not often go to a huge expense in order to do things wrongly.
I call to mind three cow-houses which I visited in the autumn of 1895. One was at a very old-fashioned manor-house near Alresford, Hants, and was a high-pitched, thatched, barn-like building, which had been used for cows 'time out of mind.' There was an open door at either end; the floor of the stalls was of beaten earth, and the middle passage between the stalls was of flint pitching. The stalls had a very slight slope from head to tail, and there was no drain of any kind, and no water-tap for the adulteration of the milk or the 'swilling down' of the building. The dung was removed every morning with shovel and besom, and, if necessary, some earth was thrown upon the floor of the stalls. This house was fragrant, and filled with the sweet breath of kine and the aroma of good upland hay. There was no suggestion or suspicion of foulness. The urine in this case must have soaked away to a great extent into the earth and between the pitching, and had done so in this place, perhaps, for centuries.
The other two cow-houses were of a different order. One was at an establishment devoted to giving technical instruction in dairying, and the other belonged to a milkman in a country town. Both had cost much money, with impermeable bricked floors, water-taps for swilling down, and drains within the building for carrying away the valuable dung and urine. They both were damp, with water lying between and in the grooves of the bricks, and both had a sickening smell of putrefaction. Neither of these two last cow-houses were desirable places in which to collect milk. I have little doubt that the Bacterium coli, which lives in water, was very abundant in both of them.
Water (unless it be boiling hot and used with abundance of soap and a scrubbing-brush) is entirely out of place in cow-houses, dairies, and butchers' shops.
Putrefaction is easily attained by swilling with cold water. Real cleanliness is unattainable in this way.
The dung and urine of all domestic animals is invaluable for the farm and garden, and it all ought to be carefully preserved. I feel that the best way of doing so would be to allow the stalls of stables, cow-houses, piggeries, &c., to have a very gentle slope to a gutter or trough filled with absorbent material, such as earth or peat moss, and protected by a grating. This trough would be cleaned out whenever it became in the least offensive, and thus the whole of the urine would be saved for the farm.
I have not given a special figure, but a reference to figs. [29] and [30], on pp. [87], [88], will show the reader what is meant.
It needs hardly to be said that all animal houses must be kept scrupulously clean. There must be no accumulations of dung, and all such ordure must be removed daily. The besom and shovel and wheelbarrow are the only proper tools for doing this.
If 'water-carried sewage' be introduced on the farm the ruin of the farmer is more certain than it is at present.