Veterinary past

A short description is given of horse- and dog-powered machines, which freed humans from several types of hard slave labor. Horse-driven norias helped to evacuate water in the construction of canals. The well-known horse mills were mainly used for milling wheat and other grains to meal. On dairy farms, dog-powered treadmills took over from maids and peasant women the heavy task of producing butter by keping cream in rapid motion in order to separate fat. Dogs also powered very diverse ustensils such as roasting spits in large kitchens and bellows in forgeries.

A short description is given of different ways of using oxen, dogs, draught- and cart horses for traction,mainly in agriculture, in Western Europe in recent centuries. The primitive way of hauling withone animal evolved to complex systems with up to six horses for one carriage. The art attained a stateof perfection around 1940-1950, before disappearing rapidly and completely, except for recreative useand in royal celebrations.

Aan de hand van een Franse monografie wordt een idee gegeven van de abominabele toestandendie in de 19de eeuw heersten in de grootstad Parijs betreffende het wegruimen en verwerkenvan dierenkrengen, in die tijd vooral paarden. Er mag geconcludeerd worden dat de Parijsevilbeluiken anno 1897 absoluut niet voldeden, noch voor wat betreft de volksgezondheid, nochvoor het verhinderen van besmettingsgevaar voor andere huisdieren. Dit wordt in een naschriftaangevuld met enkele van de schaarse gegevens over Belgische toestanden en wetgeving daterenduit het begin van de vorige eeuw.Naar ‘Des Clos d’Equarrissage’ (1897) door Theophile Alphonse Morel, vétérinaire sanitaire duDépartement de la Seine (Collectie Diergeneeskundig Verleden, Faculteit Diergeneeskunde, Merelbeke.Vertaling en bewerking door Johan De Smet).

In the monotheistic religions emerging in the Middle-East, the cradle of our civilization, pigs wereof low esteem. Eating their meat was even forbidden in the Mosaic laws, most probably because in aridor semi-arid regions these animals were in competition with humans for food. The taboo on pork couldnot be maintained within Christian practice once the church established its dominant position in WesternEurope. Products of the large woods made the fattening of domestic pigs easy in that continent,thus providing food necessary for humans to survive hard winters. In this context the early Christian,Saint Anthony of Egypt, became associated with pigs, because he was invoked to protect against epidemicsof ergotism in humans and severe inflammations of widely diverse etiology in animals as wellas in humans. The most typical of these, which occurred in pigs, was termed Saint Anthony’s fire, aswas ergotism in humans. It was mainly the religious order of the Antonites that propagated the pigletas the attribute of this saint. This unusual religious association symbolizes the acceptance in mediaevalWestern Europe of pork as high-quality food.

The expression survival of the fittest most often has a misleading connotation in contemporaryears and minds not familiar with genetics and the scientific basis of breeding. Among live organisms,heritable variation is a prerequisite for survival of a species in changing conditions of life.Variants fitting best into new conditions survive and will have the greatest chances to reproducethemselves. This is the meaning of fit in the well-known expression ‘survival of the fittest’, coinedby Herbert Spencer on Darwin’s idea of ‘natural selection’. In order to understand this, a shortlinguistic description is given, starting with to vet, meaning ‘to examine thoroughly’, a relativelyrecent expression (19th century), which at first sight seems to originate from the examinationsdone by veterinarians (vets) on racing horses, before they are allotted to certain categories in theraces. Nowadays the term is especially used in the context of checking persons applying for jobs,business takeover bids and similar situations involving a certain degree of trustworthiness. To fithas a much older pedigree. The earliest attestations are found in mediaeval texts relating militaryor fighting episodes in which the adversaries are considered to be of equal power. This survivedlater on in horse racing competitions and gradually acquired the sense of fitting one thing intoanother, or to fit into a category. For living organisms, to fit into prevailing conditions of life isof utmost importance. It was only in the previous century that the meaning of fit changed intohealthy and strong, possibly also influenced by the use of this term in racing competitions.

A manuscript on veterinary knowledge and skills as practiced by laymen in previous centuries isdescribed, using a copy dated 1880 but with parts that are probably older. It was made and owned bymembers of the Bouckaert family from Waregem, who were well known in the veterinary practiceand horsemanship circles of that time. Some of them were among the first official veterinary surgeonsand certified ‘farrier-veterinarians’ (maréchaux-vétérinaires) in Belgium during the nineteenth century.During successive generations, the older family fathers were also involved in the treatment of humans,while the care of animals was left to the sons. The very orderly presented contents of the manuscriptshow a curious mixture of veterinary science, as contained in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century textbooks,intermixed with folk remedies, including oaths and semi-religious vows. Particular attentionis given to pigeon diseases. A separate chapter contains succinct descriptions of some greatly fearedcontagious animal diseases, which were the domain of university trained veterinary ‘experts’. A textfragment on canine distemper is given as an example of accurate description of symptoms, with warningson prognosis and futile treatment attempts.

A skeleton of a large mature, probably male, dog was excavated in the city center of Tongeren, oncea Roman city in Belgium. Together with the skeleton, a circular food bowl in terra sigillata pottery wasdiscovered, positioned near the mouth of the dog, from which the upstanding edges had been removed.This was interpreted as a grave offering, representing symbolically that care was taken of the animalafter death but that the bowl had become useless now. This habit of adding a circular bowl also fits ina Celtic mythical tradition, with dogs biting off pieces of the full moon and creating the moon cyclus.Circular bowls represent the moon and are related to the mythical dogs or wolves.The archeological find is exceptional but fits into the long standing tradition of dog burials, starting14 200 years ago with the Bonn Oberkassel dog and continuing into the present. Up till now, someowners still add goods to the resting place of their pets.

Tail docking became a current practice in Belgian draft horses during the last decades of thenineteenth century. In this paper, a number of paintings and drawings by famous ‘animaliers’, in thiscase horse painters, are reproduced which convincingly demonstrate that heavy horses with intact tailswere in high esteem until about a century and a half ago. Amputation combined with partial resectionof the tail flexor muscles, fashionable in riding and cart horses of the upper class, became popular in thelate nineteenth century among leading draft horse breeders and owners. The trickle-down effect of thisfashion was the leading cause of change. This coincided with a triumphant period in the history of thishorse type. Later on, fashion changed to very short, nearly invisible tails. Resection of the tail flexormuscles became obsolete. Although forbidden by law, amputations are still carried out under medicalpretext: as a way to remediate badly healing tail wounds and sores.

Een kort overzicht wordt gegeven van de geschiedenis van de varkensselectie na WereldoorlogII. Aanvankelijk speelden rondtrekkende beerhouders hierin een belangrijke rol. De door henondersteunde selectie naar een betere vlees-vetverhouding met minder aandacht voor groei, voederomzeten vruchtbaarheid, werd gestimuleerd door berenkeuringen, het varkensstamboek enfokvarkensveilingen. De selectie had voor gevolg dat bijna de hele Belgische varkenspopulatiegebaseerd op het Belgisch landvarken en de piétrain stressgevoelig werd. Voor het opsporen vande stressgevoeligheid werd in de zeventiger jaren van de vorige eeuw de halothaantest op puntgesteld. De inzet van stressnegatieve beren voor de fok van productiezeugen zorgde al snel vooreen opmars van het stressnegatieve gen in het Belgisch landras. Vanaf 1985 werden die varkensingeschreven in een apart stamboek ‘Belgisch halothaan-negatief’. Zo kwam men geleidelijktot zeugenlijnen die homozygoot stressnegatief waren (AA): het Belgisch negatief ras of BN-ras.In 1981-82 werd de halothaantest stopgezet. Men kweekte verder met de lijnen die stressnegatiefwaren. Vanaf 1992 werd ook bloedonderzoek mogelijk: met een DNA-test kon het genotypevan de dieren op het gebied van stressgevoeligheid opgespoord worden. Door de introductie vankunstmatige inseminisatie (KI) kon men relatief kleine piétrainberen inzetten op de grote zeugenvan het Belgisch landras. Daardoor volstond een minder bevleesde zeug om toch tot de besteslachtvarkens te komen. Dus kon men de zeugen opnieuw selecteren op vruchtbaarheid en worpgrootte.Door gebruik te maken van de hybridefoktechniek kon men selecteren op worpgrootte(bij de zeugen) en op bevleesdheid (bij de beren). Bij kruisingen bekomt men veel biggen metvoldoende vleesaanzet. Bijna alle slachtvarkens bij ons hebben een piétrainbeer als vader.De technieken gebruikt bij de natuurlijke dekking, de sperma-afname en de kunstmatige inseminatieworden beschreven, samen met de factoren die de bevruchtingsresultaten beïnvloeden.De drachtigheidsresultaten worden voor een belangrijk stuk bepaald door de manier waarop debronstdetectie uitgevoerd wordt. Op grote fokbedrijven wordt zaad van de beren afgenomen enter plaatse geïnsemineerd. In andere gevallen gebeurt dit in de KI-centra, waarbij het verdundesperma na controle op kwaliteit rechtstreeks bij de zeugenhouders wordt afgeleverd die dan zelfde inseminaties uitvoeren. In 2010 werden negen op tien Vlaamse biggen kunstmatig verwektmet sperma uit een erkend KI-centrum.

‘Slaughter’ and ‘slay’, words of Germanic origin, and ‘beat’ and ‘abattoir’ of Latin descent, all referto a primitive way of rendering animals unconscious, of ‘knocking them out’, before actually killingthem with a knife by cutting the throat or the main blood vessels in the heart region. The situation iscomplicated by religious traditions. Ritual slaughter in the Islamic and Judaic traditions dates back toBiblical times, when Abraham (Ibrahim) was prevented by God (Jahweh, Allah) from offering (sacrificing)his only son, who was replaced on the altar by a ram. In the orthodox Jewish tradition, the killingof animals for food is complicated by a strong taboo against blood. This came to expression in the strictrules for killing the conscious animal with a sharp knife and for avoiding contact with the animal’sblood. In the Christian tradition, the taboos disappeared after the early period because it was realizedthat Jesus, as the Lamb of God, has sacrificed himself in order to save and redeem mankind. The notionof sacrifice is still associated with killing animals for food or other human use. In the biomedicalliterature, the term ‘sacrifice’, originally meaning ‘offer’, is frequently used to designate the killing ofexperimental animals. In four surahs in the Koran, the importance is stressed of offering all animalsbeing put to death for food to the One and Only Allah. The slaughtering technique is not stipulated inany further detail, except for the rule that the animals should not be beaten to death and that the bloodevacuated should not be consumed.