Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1874 — Carbon for Hogs. [ARTICLE]

Carbon for Hogs.

Thebe is no doubt in our minds of the benefits arising from feeding crude carbonaceous matter to swine when they are kept in close pens. The avidity with which hogs eat rotten wood is well known. Charcoal is hut another form of carbon. Bitqpinous coal is still another form. The utility of feeding wood and coal has long been recognized. We some years since substituted the ordinary Western stone coal with the best results, where from two to five hundred hogs were kept in close pens and fed on the refuse of city hotels. Something of the kind seems as necessary to them as salt to strictly herbiverous animals. We have known them to consume a pound in the course of a day, and again they would not seek the coal for some time. Just what particular use the coal is in the animal economy is not so easy to answer. Swine are especially liable to scrofulous and inflammatory diseases. Carbon, in the shape of coal, is an antiseptic, and the probability is that it acts in this way in purifying the blood.— Western Rural.