NEED OF SHELTER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21560, 24 January 1940, Page 3

NEED OF SHELTER

IMPROVING CONDITION OF STOCK WARMTH AN EQUIVALENT FOR FOOD Personal interest calls for every effort to promote the comfort and value of an animal which both feeds and clothes mankind. But too often the hardest treatment seems to be considered good enough for sheep. Notwithstanding that our flocks are now of a far better and more valuable kind, they are expected to weather every storm of winter just as the sheep of a very inferior kind had to do in the primitive condition of agriculture. It has been found in Ireland that a fattening sheep in the open field will gain in liveweight 21b a week in fine weather, while in bad weather it will not gain at all no matter how well it may be fed. A sheep folded on turnips in the winter uses about 40 per cent, of all the food it consumes to maintain the heat of its body. But if this heat is maintained artificially, or in other words, if the waste of it by excessive external cold is diminished by shelter against wintry winds, the necessity for this enormous loss by combustion within the lungs of the animal will also be diminished and a great saving of food follow. Food and Temperature A series of experiments upon rabbits shows in a curious but striking manner the relations which subsist between the quality of food required by an animal and its power of maintaining its normal temperature, also the need of a natural covering as a protection against cold. Two rabbits were placed ' in a cool chamber (between 50 degrees and 60 degrees Fahr.). The larger and heavier of the two was kept con- | stantly shorn, and the weight of food which each consumed was ascertained daily. For two weeks the shorn rabbit resisted the cold, eating every day at least one-third more than the unshorn one, yet losing constantly in weight, while the other one gained. During this time the temperature of the shorn animal was about half a degree less than that of the unshorn one. After two weeks the organism of the shorn rabbit became unequal to the task of producing heat, the temperature fell, and on the nineteenth day the animal died. During this short period it had lost more than one-sixth of its weight. Animal Heat Liebig, in his work on animal chemistry, was the first to accurately define the source of animal heat, and the constituents of the food used in its support. He showed that warmth is an equivalent for food, to a certain i extent, and that cold, on the other hand, renders necessary a greater supply of food by carrying off rapidly the heat which its combustion engenders. He also pointed out that motion is always accompanied by a waste of matter in the body, and that an economy of food is necessarily the result of an economy of motion. Experiments upon feeding sheep in sheds amply confirm these theories. The warmth communicated by the sheds is equivalent to a certain amount of food, and the deprivation of motion causes a diminished waste of tissues of the body, and therefore a corresponding saving of ailment.