High Pressure Livestock

[Oscar]

"The Best Of Peter McArthur" published by Clarke, Irwin and Co. in 1967.

The book is a collection of the rural columns he wrote for the Toronto Globe from 1909 to 1924 and for the Farmer's Advocate from 1910 to 1917 when he was living on his fifty-acre farm thirty miles from London, Ontario (Appin). He had previously been a writer/editor in London and New York and was very well-known in his day. He was born in 1866 and died in 1924.

Here's a column he wrote called "High-Pressure Livestock" which is from the book:

"There has been so much in the papers recently about high-frequency hens and super-efficient cows that I am going to venture a dangerous paragraph that may provoke some unpleasant controversy. Twice in the past few years I have heard theories advanced which would tend to show that human psychology is seriously affected by animals or fowls specialized in. There is a picture in my mind of an eminent Western ranchman who sat with his feet on the desk and expounded to me his theory that it is possible to know at once by observable characteristics just what is a farmer's specialty. As he specialized in beef cattle he naturally held that cattlemen are usually men of large and generous proportions, with idea in keeping with their bulk. As his description of horsemen, sheepmen, cattlemen and poultry specialists were not very flattering, I shall not venture to indicate them. But his theory sounded as plausible as many others, and he was able to back it up with instances that seemed to carry weight. The next testimony that seemed to bear on this point came from a young agricultural specialist who had been travelling though the country investigating certain farm conditions for a government department. He assured me that attempts to develop cows of high milk pressure and butter content and of early laying hens of record-breaking capacity apparently tended to develop a greedy and overreaching type of human being. The man who tried to get the last ounce out of a hen or a cow, he claimed, always wanted to get the last possible penny out of everyone he dealt with. Of course this is a very sweeping generalization to make on somewhat casual data, but there may be something in it. The scriptural injunction, "muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn," would suggest that the highest efficiency and the most desirable characters do not always go together. What do you think?"

Read more at:

http://www.lib.unb.ca/archives/hathaway ... l#mcarthur

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ ... rthur.html