SHEEF-FARMING IN ARGENTINA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1285, 15 October 1896, Page 4

SHEEF-FARMING IN ARGENTINA.

A NEW PEST— CARBUNCLE

The latest developments in the way of disease (writes the Buenos Ayres correspondent of the Australasian Pcistoralists• Review) cooje from Cordoba and Santa Fe. in the former province carbuncle has broken out badly, while in Santa F 6, red murrain, after a lapse of several years, has again made its appearance. This latter is the most fatal disease we know, and also the hardest to get rid of. The first time I ever saw it, and X believe X am right in saying the first time it ever visited the province of Santa Fe, was some twenty-two years ago. It then broke out among a lot of fine bred heifeis, which were selected from a large herd, and placed apart in some low-lying land. No one seemed to know what it was, though that something was wrong soon became painfully evident, for in less than three weeks only 50 were left out of 130 odd animals. They were removed and taken to a distant part of the same estancia, and put on some salt iandj and there the disease stopped. The land where the .disease had broken out was shortly -after rented to Italian colonists on a ifour years* lease it was ploughed up ■and cropped with wheat, and at the end of the term laid down in alfalfa. During the years the colonists had it they occasionally lost a bullock from the same disease, but no sooner was the land stocked with store cattle than red murrain, again broke out, occasioning this time a very heavy mortality. A.nd so it coipos and goes. Where once it has been it will surely break out sooner or later again. Carbuncle, so far as. I know, has never appeared in an epidemic form in any part of the county. I have at long intervals heard of isolated cases, and,

in one or two instances, of as many as twenty or thirty beasts dying out of herds of 7000 or 8000, but then no one ever dreams of leaving an animal above ground that has died of this most horrible ailment. They are always buried at once. Some years ago, I lost one of my best peons through thi3. I had sent him with four others to bury a bull that had died in the night. While digging a hole to put him in, a mosquito or fly stung him on the lip, the next day his head had swelled to the size of a pumpkin, and the day following he died from suffocation.