CONDITION OF COWS.

Opunake Times, Volume III, Issue 137, 25 October 1895, Page 3

CONDITION OF COWS.

(to the editob.) Sib, —I notice in your issue of the 10th insfc a letter from Mr H. S. Briant, rather warmly resenting some harmless allusions in my notes of a late issue, regarding the low condition of cows in this district. I would not waste your space in replying, had not the writer adopted such a needlessly aggressive and personal tone towards myself, and besides my veracity as a correspondent must be vindicated. My remarks were based on my own observation, and on what I had heard from other dairymen, and as regards the majority of the cows were, I regret to say, quite correct. I had no intention whatever of disparaging the cows of this particular district, and neither said nor implied that they were any worse than others, and if Mr Briant reads the papers, he will see that correspondents from many other parts of Taranaki tell the same tale. My knowledge of cows is probably on a par with Mr Briant's, having been as the .Yankies say, " raised amongst them," so I should at all events be able to distinguish " a store steer from a milking cow." The only reason I can assign for Mr Bri-

ant's rushing into print on the pretext of debating this simple malter is,' that, being anxious to see his own name in the paper, and well aware that his literary ability and mental capacity precluded the possibility of his tackling any more abstruse subject than that of cows and cowspanking, he rushed in accordingly at at the earliest opportunity on this subject.—l am, &c, The Correspondent. Awatuna, October 52ud, 1895.