CHECKING SHEEP SCAB

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 774, 21 September 1929, Page 35

CHECKING SHEEP SCAB

DATES BACK 2,000 YEARS ! “Sheep scab was known in 160 8.C.,” J said Captain Norman Bissetts, adj viser in veterinary science at the Uni- ! versity College, Cardiff, when addressing an English farmers’ union on the subject. External applications were used to remedy it. as far back as 1787, he said. If it were not checked it would kill one in every ten sheep. It was one of the most contagious of diseases, and all the sheep in the flock would be affected in three weeks or a month. It ! was responsible for loss of condition J in sheep, and it destroyed the fleece. | The milk supply of the ewes was | practically nothing, the young lambs ! were stunted, and the majority of the j pregnant ewes would suffer. ! He detailed at length the cause of i the disease, and said that dogs would j act as carriers of the mites, so that | when sheep dipping, farmers might as well “put the dogs through it.” [ Double dipping throughout the { country was, he contended, the only i remedy; no single dip would destroy ' the eggs. The first dip would destroy J the mites, but the eggs remained. | That was why double dipping was ab- [ solutely necessary. New Zealand ! and Australia had got rid of it, and j it was strange that they had not been able to do the same in England. Maybe some Government regulations were j framed by armchair fossils, but the sheep-dipping regulations were framed by practical men, and ought to be carried out to the letter. He contended that a farmer ought to : be boycotted by his neighbours if he were guilty of failing to deal with ] isheep scab.