The Tick Pest.

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2094, 16 April 1898, Page 2

The Tick Pest.

A kemedy for the Queensland tick pest seems to have been found, experiments by a stock inspector in the Mackay district being attended with success. Some clean cattle were inoc--1 ulated, driven with a lot of uninoculated beasts to a tick infested paddock, and left there for five weeks. . At the end of that time most of the latter were dead, and all the inoculated lot were found to be ‘ all right;* the verdict of the delighted owner adding * Plenty ticks ; five weeks amongst them; no sickness.* It is hard to realise in New Zealand what a relief this will be to the station-holders of Queensland. For two years they have been hopelessly fighting a pest of which they had previously had no experience, and which came down on them without warning. . Inquiry, frenzied and diligent, revealed the fact that no specific had ever been discovered for mitigating its ravages. This was the verdict of competent authority in the United States, which had studied the pest for years in Texas and New Mexico. Australasian veterinaries contemplated ticks, living and dead, through microscopes hopelessly. Agricultural departments communicated with biologists of the Pasteur method fruitlessly; quarantine liDesand ueutral zones were established across the continent; the hide trade was paralysed in several colonies, and stook-owhers in the north wore brought near to ruin by the peremptory stoppage of all stock movements. Certainly this news that inoculation can be successfully carried out will be welcome,