Book Description

Excerpt from Dentition: As Indicative of the Age of the Animals of the Farm Judging the age by the teeth is an ancient art, the origin of which may perhaps be dated back to the time of the domestication of the horse - an animal which, for commercial and economic reasons, must have attracted more attention than those which were used for food. In modern times the system was extended to other animals of the farm, as appears from the older veterinary writers on dentition, among them M. Girard, whose observations and illustrations were copied by Youatt, and from his book by more recent writers. There is a general belief among stock-owners that the improvement which has taken place in the various breeds of farm animals, as the result of careful breeding and feeding, has led to early maturity of the teeth, as well as of other organs and tissues of the body. For this idea, Girard, and after him Youatt and other writers, are certainly responsible. According to them, cattle do not get the full set of broad teeth until they are four or five years old, sheep at four years old, and swine at three years old. Bat when the writer of this paper, with these views ill his mind, commenced an inquiry on dentition in 1850, he soon found out how very wide of the truth they were. Cattle bred oh the Royal Agricultural College Farm had their dentition perfectly complete in most cases under three years and a half, in many instances soon after three years, and, in one case, at two years and ten months. Sheep had their full complement of teeth at three years, and pigs soon after one year and a half. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.