Prevention. The one thing to be secured is the prevention of copulation with any animal that has been affected, or exposed to this disease in the past three years.
1st. Any stallion or mare once affected must be excluded from breeding for at least three years after apparent recovery.
2d. Every such animal that has been exposed by copulation with a suspected animal must be excluded from breeding for the same period even if no active symptoms have been shown.
3d. Every affected or exposed animal, should be quarantined in the hands of his or her owner and placed on an official register and the sale, gift or loan of such an animal, or its movement to a new place where it might propagate the disease should be made a misdemeanor.
4th. In any county or district in which the disease exists all stallions and mares should be registered and none should be allowed to be used for breeding purposes without an official certificate showing that each of the animals mated is free from all suspicion of having been exposed to this infection.
5th. If any stallion or mare is imported from a country in which dourine exists it should be accompanied by an official certificate showing that it has not in the past three years been exposed to the possibility of infection with dourine.
6th. In the absence of such certificate the imported animal (capable of breeding) should be kept in strict quarantine for the period of three years.
7th. A much more radical measure, which may be made to supersede all of the above, would be to castrate every soliped (stallion or mare) which has suffered from the disease in the past three years, and every such animal that has by coition been exposed during that length of time to even a remote opportunity for contagion. This would embrace all apparently sound mares that had been served by a stallion which had shown slight symptoms of the disease, or by a stallion which had not himself shown such symptoms, but which had served a mare that had shown such symptoms; or one that had served a mare that had not shown such symptoms, but that had been previously served by a stallion which had shown such symptoms, or that previously covered a mare that had shown such symptoms. In such cases the State might well afford to indemnify the owner for any reduction in value of the castrated stallion from that borne by the animal as a prospective breeder, the breeding for which indemnity is sought being understood to count only from a date of three years after the sanitary castration. A mare once attacked should be remorselessly castrated or killed. A perfect recovery in a horse can be better attested; that of a mare is always uncertain, and most secondary outbreaks after the apparent extinction of the poison have come from breeding mares that have apparently recovered, or that after exposure have shown no appreciable symptoms.
When a State is so lost to all sanitary considerations as to abandon an affection of this kind to take its course, the owners of stallions and mares cannot be too careful to avoid the exposure of their valuable breeders to the risk of infection. Each mare brought for service should be admitted only when accompanied by a certificate showing all previous services in the last three years, with the identification of the stallion, and this irrespective of whether the service has been fruitful or not. In such certificate the owner of the mare should bind himself to make good all damage or loss that may accrue from his failure to set forth in the certificate every such service and every symptom of illness affecting the generative organs from which the mare has suffered in the three years antecedent.
The owner of the stallion should give a similar guarantee that the horse has in the past three years served no mare that was in any way open to suspicion, and that the animal has not suffered from any affection of the generative organs which had any of the characteristics of dourine.