Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 27, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 33.

Health and Temperance.

Scavengers—Not Food.

SWINE are scavengers; they were designed to destroy the filth which might accumulate on the surface of the ground and pollute the atmosphere. In northern latitudes, scavengers are not much needed, and nature makes no great provision for them. In the warm parts of our country, where all growth is rank, and decomposition takes place more rapidly, they are more abundant. The death of a creature in the fields or woods will soon fill the air with buzzards. Did the people generally pay regard to sanitary rules, scavengers (if not raised by man) would hardly be known north of "Mason and Dixon's line."

But when swine are raised and fattened for gain, they are the very opposite of scavengers; they are not destroyers, but makers of filth. There is no greater nuisance in a village than a pig-pen. And the farther the owner puts it away from his house, the nearer of necessity he puts it to somebody else's house. Nothing else so loads the atmosphere with corruption. Even the tobacco nuisance has its intermissions, for people cannot smoke when they sleep. But in the still hours of the night, when the atmosphere is damp, and not generally agitated by winds, then the hog-pen sends forth its most intolerable smells, which find their way into the neighboring sleeping rooms, if the occupants have dared to risk a proper ventilation in the vicinity of such an abomination.—Pacific Health Journal and Temperance Advocate.