VETERINARY SERVICE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1938, Page 3

VETERINARY SERVICE

DEVELOPMENT IN BRITAIN. The British Government’s State Veterinary Service came into operation recently and it has some interesting features which lend themselves for consideration in the Dominion. It is not so much a new as a reorganised service. It will now be possible to co-ordinate the work so as to get the best results from all effort put into it, observes a Home writer. One defect of the system that it is to replace has been that useful experience has not always become available for the general information of the service, and, accordingly, there has not been all the uniformity or efficiency to which the sum of experience might have led. It may be a moot point whether the position regarding animal disease in general is worse or better than it was 50 or 100 years ago. There can be no question, however, about the heavy tax that disease now imposes upon owners of live stock. Just how much reasonable control would save the industry may be a matter of speculation, but it could not be described otherwise than as a huge sum. INTERFERING WITH NATURE. We talk about nature and natural conditions, but we must recognise that our- farm live stock have not followed the course of ordinary evolution but have been forced along certain lines by human control. The cow in nature gave perhaps a hundred gallons of milk and we have made her into a machine to yield one,

two, or three thousand gallons. When we have developed her on beef lines we have secured maturity at two instead of six years. We have done something similar with sheep. We have cut the commercial pig’s tenure of life to a minimum and have given the domestic fowl a whole-time job in egg production instead of the responsibilities of a modest spriflg clutch.

How far our interference with the natural evolution for disease problems hardly matters. It may be, too, that we have been slow to recognise the insidiousness of maladies that from slight inconvenience have developed into a serious menace. We have to accept things as we find them, and there are high hopes that the intensive campaign now launched will have good and lucrative results. Rinderpest, pleuro-pneumonia, epizootic lymphangitis, sheep pox, rabies, glanders, are shadows of the past; the deadly anthrax arises only from importation, and is in control. We have our problems of tuberculosis, contagious abortion, mastitis, swine fever, sheep scab, cocidiosis, 8.W.D., and so forth, not to mention, foot-and-mouth disease, which, leaping the barriers of the sea, make our own efforts somewhat despairing.

Yet, having accomplished so much with less well organised means of attack, one may hope for success against such things as T. 8., contagious abortion, mastitis, and poultry diseases, which levy, such a heavy financial toll on agriculture. The State Veterinary Service will increase in effectiveness as time passes, and we look forward to steady and eventually great results from the new outlook on animal health.