MORTALITY AMONG LAMBS.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 204, 2 January 1894, Page 2

MORTALITY AMONG LAMBS.

TO THE EDITOIt OF THK STAR. Sin,— ln your issue of December 28th you published an account of serious loss among lambs after docking, owing to farmers cutting them in unseasonable weather. Fifty per cent of deaths is a very heavy loss, though " to be regretted, yet the loss must be put down (1) either to brutal treatment, or (2) to unseasonable weather, or (3) to both combined. On the 16th instant I docked, without any help, thirty lambs, the stragglers, many of them, being big ones, and I lost none of them. The day was fine, glass high, and a brisk drying wind blowing, which caused the fibrine in the blood to quickly coagulate and there was little or no bleeding, except a trifle from the ear mark. The tails I burn off with a heated copper tool, which sears the tail and there is rarely a drop of blood shed from the stump. The lambs, instead of lying down slowly bleeding, as a rule, run off calling loudly for their mothers. The la in 03 receive no check by this method.- '-:■■ New Zealand is essentially a pastoral country, sheep rearing being the chief employment ; and yefc^ notwithstanding the provisions of the Education Act, which allows agricultural science to be taugbt in our public schools — a subject of such, vital importance to. our material welfare — how few of the youths of this colony are being taught the fundamental principles of agricultural and pastoral pursuits ? Our Boards of Education are to blame, and the Wanganui Board perhaps more than any other. For many say that the Board consists of the Secretary, Inspector, and a board of nonentities. Undoubtedly far more attention is given to such trifles as the dotting of an i, or the true VereFosterG, than to such important subjects as the constituents of our blood, the way to stop bleeding from a severe cut with a slasher, the composition and effects of the various sheep dips, the blights on our fruit trees, the strength and durability of our timbers, etc. It is to be hoped that three fresh members will be elected on the Board in March next, men, or women, with souls above a vere Foster's G, and who will take steps to see that our rising generation in this district are taught something that will help them to become intelligent and thinking — not merely rule of thumb — farmers. ''Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." He was a far-seeing statesman who wrote that. .Let our country school walls be hung with specimens of the Agricultural, Pastoral, and Horticultural products of their respective districts, instead of copies of official letters which not one in a thousand will ever have occasion to write. Let the cupboards be filled with specimens of the various insect pests that attack our grass, our fruit trees, our wheat, and our turnips, and let our teachers be encouraged to give instruction on these matters, and let the inspectors examine the children on the leaflets and other matters issued by the Agricultural Department, then, our rural population will hold their own with any in the world, and will become in the near future the nutin* stay of the colony in a social and political, as well as monetary sense. This will be found of far more practical utility, for the next ten years, than Sir Robert Stout's pet schemes of establishing technical schools of design for the purpose of training an army of artisans to start industries which cannot possibly compete with those of more thickly populated coun- ! tries, His scheme will be right I enough in ten or twenty years heuce when we have settled our waste lands and have a few of Sir George Grey's unborn millions living in the country. I am, etc., George Wilks. Clare Lea, Feilding.