improvements might be effected without any very considerable amount of
trouble or expense. Far too frequently this neglect or want of care and
thought is observable in the housing of pigs. Many of the sties in the
country districts are neither wind nor water tight, and they are far too
often in a most unsanitary condition, indeed in such a disgraceful state
that some excuse was afforded for the drastic, if injudicious order of
the sanitary authorities which prohibited the erection of a pigsty
within from sixty to one hundred feet of a dwelling house. Undoubtedly
it would have been wiser to have permitted the keeping of pigs within a
much shorter distance of the house only so long as the necessary steps
were taken to prevent a nuisance or a risk of the residents in the house
suffering in health. The proximity of a pigsty to a house can be
rendered perfectly innocuous with ordinary care, and the cottager not be
deprived of very considerable advantages not only in making a profit,
but in the provision of manure for his allotment or garden which will
benefit greatly from its application.

The mistakes or want of care in the erection of pigsties is by no means
confined to the owners of cottages or small holdings, as a considerable
proportion of the piggeries on which great outlay is expended are
equally as unsuitable if not so insanitary. Even in so-called model
buildings the piggery has often been the last thing thought of; the
stables, the cow house, etc., have been conveniently placed for feeding
the occupants, for air, light, and sun, and then the piggery has been
placed in whatever spot may have been left unoccupied, and as this
generally happens to be on the northern side of the buildings, the
unhappy pigs are deprived of the rays of the sun, which are to them
quite as necessary, if not more so, than to any others of our
domesticated animals.

This same want of sun, and the exposure to cold is noticeable in only a
lesser degree in those buildings which comprise a double row of sties
with a passage down the centre, a store and a cooking and mixing house
at one end, and an exercise or feeding yard adjoining. It matters not
whether the building be placed north or south, or east or west, one half
of the sties have a wrong aspect; even if the sties facing the west can
be said to possess one. The trouble is still greater with the system of
having a yard attached to each sty. The north or east wind renders the
sties with su