PLAGUE-STRUCK ANIMALS.
"EVIDENCE of the intensity and virulence of the Plague in Bombay is given by the curious accounts telegraphed to this country of the deaths of animals from the pestilence. Some weeks ago it was reported that the pigeons were dying
• of plague. Now the rats are said for some time to have been plague-stricken, and to be dying in thousands in the native town.
If those who are fighting the Plague have time to attend to anything but the work of saving human life, we may expect more curious information on this point ; for there is evidence 'that when the plague was at its very worst in Florence, causing the death of sixty thousand persons, the pestilence acquired some kind of cumulative energy by which it went on ' from man to animals, and at last involved the latter in common destruction with their masters. As it advanced, "not -only men but animals fell sick and shortly expired, if they had touched things belonging to the diseased or dead." Boccaccio himself saw two hogs on the rags of a person who had died of plague, after staggering about for a short time, fall down dead as if they had taken poison. In the "Lives of the Roman Pontiffs " it is stated that in other places multitudes of cats, dogs, fowls, and other animals fell -victims to the contagion. There is little doubt that this concurrence of human and animal death took place in other countries than Italy, though the chroniclers, appalled by the loss of human life, only allude to " murrain " among the cattle as a concomitant of the plague. "At the commencement of the Black Death there was in England," says Hecker, "an abundance of all the necessaries of life ; but the plague, which seemed then to be the sole disease, was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among the cattle. Wandering about without herdsmen, they -fell by thousands." It is not known whether this murrain -was due to plague itself or to some special animal epidemic. But it did not break out until after the plague was rife, and added enormously to the loss of life, because it was impos- sible to remove the corn from the fields, causing everywhere a great rise in the price of food, although the harvest had been plentiful. Whether it affected wild beasts as well as domesticated animals does not appear ; but in only one Instance do we hear of an increase in their numbers such as might naturally be expected to follow the destruction of Leman life. After a plague epidemic in France in 1503 the house-dogs became wild, and later, communal hunts were organised to rid the country of these new beasts of prey, and of the wolves, which appeared in great packs.
It is not known whether the animals of Florence, like those of Bombay, were really suffering from plague. But there is good reason to believe that their deaths were connected by something more than coincidence of time with the plague 'epidemic. What the old physicians called "general morbific
conditions "—that change of atmosphere and temperature which seems to summon pestilence full-grown from the very ground in certain parts of the East—apparently prepared animal constitutions to receive the human disease. A month before the cholera became rife in Hamburg 60 per cent. of Carl Hagenbeck's animals suffered from choleraic symptoms, and he diagnosed the disease, checked it, by boiling the water, and notified the authorities of what had happened. The clarions exactness with which Homer noted that in the plague before Troy, mules and dogs were attacked before the soldiers, has often been quoted as internal evidence of the truth of the Iliad. Influenza, which was very fatal among animals, sometimes attacked them before it was felt by men, as in New York, where it first appeared among the horses. In London, horses, cats, dogs, pigeons, parrots, and penguins died of influenza. In the year 1800, when yellow. feverreached Cadiz and Seville, dogs took the disease more freely than other animals ; but cats, horses, poultry, and cage- birds also died. The symptoms in the case of the doge and cats resembled those in man. The animals were not attacked until the deaths among men numbered two hundred a day. In 1830, when the cattle, fowls, and geese of South Russia died of cholera, the appearance of the disease was also subsequent to its development among human beings.
Animal epidemics taking place simultaneously with human pestilence are immensely aggravated by the impossibility of separating infected and non-infected cattle. The herdsmen die and the flocks and herds run wild. But this does not account for the deadly character of animal epidemics in general, or for the little resistance offered by animal constitu- tions to such diseases. Human beings are usually prepared by long unwholesome living. Compare the account of the Bombay native house—dark, with the floor soaked with dirt, and the free water left always dripping from the tap by the inmates—and Erasmus's description of the floor of an English cottage, "made of nothing but loam, and strewed with rushes which being constantly put on fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, in some cases twenty years, with fish-bones, broken victuals, and other filth," and impregnated with liquid nastiness. But though chicken-cholera and other epidemics of poultry are mainly due to unwholesome sur- roundings, the life of most domestic animals, especially cattle, and of all wild animals, such as antelopes and the wild bovines, is exceptionally healthy. Except in famine years, there is no predisposing cause to make them succumb to pestilence as they do. Even when untended, so that the separation of in- fected animals is impossible, or when wild, such cattle or deer separate themselves by instinct from the herd and remain alone. Isolation is voluntary. What should prove another great factor in protecting animal life in epidemics is the absence of those nervous terrors which always predispose human beings to infection, and often cause death itself by the mere horror of anticipation. Fear, contrition, religious mania, despondency, grief, despair, drink, and delirium, and the break-up of the normal social order, swelled the list of human deaths in the epidemics of the Middle Agee, and some of these factors aggravate the incidence of every great plague among mankind. It is not so with animals. Their naturally healthy frames are impaired by no nervous terrors or morbid mental affections in the presence of disease. Though some of the more intelligent are distressed at the deaths of their masters, they exhibit great indifference to wholesale mortality among their own species. Yet with every chance in their favour they succumb to pestilence in a manner quite unaccountable. The statistics of the rinderpest epidemic in South Africa will probably never be forthcoming. Its general results, so far as Matabeleland is concerned, are well known. They indicate the total destruction, so far as trans- port and food are concerned, of the domestic cattle of the country. With them, over large areas, the antelopes and other ruminants have perished. The reason of this great mortality has never been explained, though the main source of infection, at least in countries where cattle or game run wild, is obvious. It is at the drinking places that all animals, infected or sound, necessarily meet, however much the former may desire to wander away in solitude. This was proved in part during the cattle-plagne in this country, where certain farms in which the herds were watered from protected wells, and never allowed to drink from the streams, continued free from the disease.
As a set-off to the rapid mortality of animals in plagues the rate of their subsequent recovery in numbers must be taken into account. The subject now most anxiously debated in South Africa is the time which must elapse before the herds of cattle are replenished. The time will probably be less than the most sanguine could anticipate. Destructive as they are at the time, plagues leave no such far-reaching results among animals as among men. It is in the period subsequent to pestilence that the simplicity of their lives gains by contrast. They have no social life to be disorganised, no nexus of trade to be broken, no famine to fear from un- filled fields, no general weakening of the race from inherited weakness and nervous disorders transmitted for generations from parents who never fully recovered the "plague terror." The mental shock transmitted by the Black Death produced nervous disorders for two centuries,—the Dancing mania from Norway to Abyssinia, convulsions, hysteria, delusions of all sorts, aggravated by famine and poverty, the direct results of the plague. For animals, on the contrary, there are no nervous sequela to an epidemic. The race is improved rather than impaired, for the aged, the weak, and the unfit are dead, and only the strong parents survive. The increase in fecundity—an increase noted even among the surviving European population after the Black Death—is very great, and in place of being checked by famine due to unfilled fields, is fostered by the surplus of natural food for a reduced number of mouths.
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