Great Epizootic of 1872

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
A few weeks ago, listener Colin rode in to ask
for an episode on the Great Epizootic of eighteen seventy two.
I imagine this might have been inspired by the current
situation with Avian flu, but I did not ask. An
episootic is an epidemic but in non human animals, and
this one was a massive outbreak of a flu like

(00:41):
illness that was primarily among horses. Was in North America,
Central America, and some of the islands in the Caribbean.
There were also a lot of different names for this
eighteen seventy two outbreak as it was happening.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
A big one was just.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
The epizootic, or the episode, which makes it sounds sillier
than it was to me. Since it was first reported
in Canada, people also called it Canadian horse disease. There
was also horse qatar, catarl fever, mucus fever, distemper blitz,
guitar la grip, and horse influenza.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Most of the.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Horses that got this disease recovered, but this did still
lead to the deaths of tens of thousands or even
hundreds of thousands of horses and other equines, and it
caused massive disruptions all across the continent. Written records of
disease in horses go back more than one thousand years,
and records of flu like epidemic horse diseases date back

(01:43):
to at least the thirteenth century. But unless someone on
earths a viable sample and tests it, we don't really
have a way to know which specific pathogen caused any
of these past diseases, or whether it was the same
one that caused the eighteen seventy two epizootic. People documented
epidemics in horses for more than five hundred years before

(02:05):
the germ theory of disease started to develop in the
nineteenth century. Although the word virus was already in use,
the identification of specific viruses didn't happen until the eighteen nineties.
That was about two decades after this outbreak, so most
of this history happened before people had the ability to

(02:25):
pinpoint a specific pathogen, especially as specific virus, as the
cause of an outbreak. Today, the most common explanation for
the Great epizootic of eighteen seventy two is equine influenza,
which is caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A
is one virus species, but it has a lot of

(02:46):
different strains, and some of those strains are very closely
related to one another. In addition to causing equine influenza,
strains of influenza A can also cause highly pathogenic avian
influenza as well as seasonal flu in humans, and it
also causes other flu like diseases, mainly among birds and mammals.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Some of the historical outbreaks of flu like diseases in
horses happened at the same time as outbreaks of similar
disease in both human and non human animals. This could
have been from the equine virus infecting other species, or
from a non equine virus infecting horses, or from multiple
strains of influenza that all happen to be circulating at

(03:33):
the same time. That is happening now as we are
recording this. We have a lot of influenza A, especially
but also influenza B that's causing seasonal flu in the US,
and also avian influenza happening at the same time. This

(03:53):
epizootic happened during the early years of veterinary education in
North America. We have an up on the history of
veterinary medicine that we replayed as a Saturday Classic in
May of twenty twenty two. But briefly, until the start
of the nineteenth century, there were no veterinary colleges in
North America. Large animals like horses were primarily being cared

(04:17):
for by farriers or by people who had been living
and working with animals for a long time, like farmers
and stable hands, or people who had trained in human medicine.
Veterinary colleges started to be established in North America in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the first
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree to be awarded in the

(04:39):
US didn't happen until eighteen seventy six, so that was
four years after this outbreak started. So a lot of
the veterinarians who wrote and offered advice about this epizootic
as it was happening were people who had emigrated to
North America from Europe, where colleges of veterinary medicine back

(05:00):
to the mid eighteenth century. One was James Law, Chair
of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery at Cornell University. He had
immigrated to the US from Scotland to accept that position
in eighteen sixty seven, when Cornell's veterinary program was first established,
he wrote a report on the epizootic that described its

(05:21):
symptoms this way. Quote. A horse in apparently robust and
vigorous health is seen with drooping head, ears and lips,
semi closed eyelids, expressionless countenance, and one or two legs
partially flexed, as if to seek relief from his weariness.
He stands in one position, or, if urged to move,

(05:41):
does so with reluctance, sluggishness, and often with unsteady, swaying gait.
The back is arched and rigid, the limbs carried stiffly,
and the joints off and crack. At the same time,
there may be noticed a dry, staring coat, a tenderness
of the skin when handled, a tendency to coldness of
the nose, ears, and limbs, and in exceptional cases, shivering,

(06:06):
tremors or even nervous jerking. A cough is always an
early symptom, and in the visitation of eighteen seventy two.
It has been usually the first observed, as it was
by far the most prominent of the early symptoms.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Law described the disease as progressing to include a fever,
rapid pulse that was usually weak and compressible, signs of dehydration,
and accelerated breathing. A second phase of the illness typically
included a worsening of all those initial symptoms, as well
as discharge from the eyes and nose. Touching affected horses

(06:42):
throats seemed to cause them pain, and afterward they would
often cough violently. After this phase of the illness, most
horses recovered, with the disease lasting between two and three weeks,
but there could also be various complications, including pneumonia, pleurisy,
and abdominal issues, and this was especially the case in

(07:03):
horses that were forced to continue working while they were sick.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Alexandre Leutar had also immigrated to the US, arriving from
Paris in the eighteen fifties to both practice veterinary medicine
and earn his MD from University Medical College, which is
now the New York University School of Medicine. In eighteen
seventy two. He was Chief Veterinary Surgeon to the New
York College of Veterinary Surgeons and the consultant to the

(07:31):
Board of Health. He contributed to a report on the
progress of the epizootic in New York that included a
description of just how sudden and widespread it was. He
summarized the reports of the city's health inspectors as saying
quote one that all or very nearly all the horses
in the city were affected by the disease. Two that

(07:52):
the symptoms appeared suddenly, not only invading nearly all the
stables at once, but affecting at once nearly all the
horses in each stable. And three that the disease attacked
impartially the well housed and well fed and those exposed
to hardships. Leo Tire also wrote about how to treat
the illness quote The treatment of influenza must be in

(08:15):
accordance with the symptoms. During the simple catarrhal form of
the disease, the diet should consist of dry or boiled oats, mashes,
oat rye or corn meal, gruels, roots, and fruits. These
articles should be varied and given in small quantities. The
temperature should be regulated by blanketing, bandaging of the extremities

(08:36):
in general or local friction. Good ventilation should be secured,
and disinfectants used in moderation. He went on to say, quote,
in the majority of cases, the hygienic measures above mentioned
together with rest will prove entirely sufficient to affect a cure.
Rest is of the utmost important. Without it, the animal

(08:58):
will scarcely escape some of the sequel of the disease.
Experience has taught me that rest is of paramount importance
for all those animals whose labors were suspended. As soon
as they were taken sick, escaped complications and resumed work
in a few days. On the other hand, a large
mortality occurred among railroad and stage horses. Many of these animals,

(09:21):
being kept constantly at work, were attacked by serious complications,
purpura haemorrhagica being the most frequent and perhaps the most fatal.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
While rest was the primary treatment, Lutar also recommended various
steps to try to reduce some of the horse's symptoms,
like using lineaments to relieve a sore throat, steaming with
boiling water with various ingredients added to soothe coughs, and
using preparations of antimony as an expectorant. James Law's treatment

(09:54):
recommendations were very similar, really stressing the need for rest
and offering way to relieve some of the symptoms. Both
men stressed that sick horses should not be bled or
given any kind of purgatives. They needed to be supported
and allowed to rest as soon as they became ill. Basically,

(10:14):
this was a lot like the advice that's given to
people who get the flu today. Although there are some
anti viral medications that are indicated for some people, and
there are people who need to go to the hospital
for further treatment if they become dehydrated or experienced some
other complications.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
But there were also a lot of quack cures advertised
in newspapers and journals during this outbreak. The same kinds
of patent medicines that were advertised to people for all
kinds of ailments. These, of course, did not work, and
some of them could be dangerous to the animals they
were administered to.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
We will look at the way this outbreak progressed after
a sponsor break. Most accounts from the eighteen seventies say
the epizootics started in Ontario, Canada in areas north of

(11:09):
Toronto in September of eighteen seventy two. Much later, it
was noted that there had also been some isolated outbreaks
of horse illnesses in August as well. Those were in
Mercer County, Pennsylvania, Hillsboro and Merrimack, New Hampshire, and Forsyth County,
North Carolina. All of these states are on the east

(11:31):
coast of the US, but otherwise they are not very
close together at all, and it's not really clear if
these outbreaks were related to the epizootic or caused by
the same pathogen. Regardless of whether those August cases were
related or not, once the disease got to Toronto, it
started spreading more widely. Fourteen cases were reported in Toronto

(11:54):
on September thirtieth, and by October eleventh, there were reports
of sick horses Niagara Falls, and on the next day,
the disease had reached Ottawa.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
By this point, even though people hadn't figured out how
to isolate and identify specific pathogens, the germ theory of
disease was becoming more widely accepted, but flu like illnesses
were still something of an exception, especially in cases of
widespread outbreaks. Like this one. It started very suddenly, sickening

(12:24):
large numbers of animals, seemingly all at once. Keepers reported
whole stables of animals being sickened over less than forty
eight hours, and the illness wasn't spreading from one stall
to the next, as though each horse was contracting it
from the one next to them. It showed up all over,
so initially people thought it might be related to some

(12:45):
kind of atmospheric condition or the weather, rather than any
kind of contagion.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
But the outbreak quickly reached places that had a totally
different landscape, climate, and weather than the parts of Canada
that were first affected. On October thirteenth, the disease reached Detroit, Michigan,
and Buffalo, New York. Half the horses in Rochester, New York,
were sick by the seventeenth and by the nineteenth, the

(13:11):
diseases in Syracuse. By October twenty second, it was in
New York City and Boston, and it became very obvious
that it was following transportation lines, specifically railroads and canals.
Infection rates were massive, effecting at least eighty percent of horses,
sometimes as many as ninety nine percent, as well as donkeys, mules,

(13:35):
and even some circus animals like zebras.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
On October twenty eighth, the disease was reported in Washington,
d c. By the start of November, the illness had
hit Cleveland, Ohio, and Charleston, South Carolina. It was continuing
to spread in Canada as well, reaching Halifax, Nova, Scotia
on November fourth. By the eleventh, it was in Indianapolis, Indiana,
and Savannah, Georgia. It reached Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee

(14:03):
on the eighteenth.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
The Episoatic was reported in Havana, Cuba, on December seventh.
In early February of eighteen seventy three, it reached Monterey, Mexico.
It didn't reach California until March, but by April it
had spread across much of the state. This included San Francisco,
where it reached on April nineteenth, and by the twenty

(14:25):
fifth all of the city's railroad horses were affected. The
Episoatic continued into Central America over the summer, reaching Guatemala
in July and El Salvador in August, and the outbreak
seems to have stopped there by December of eighteen seventy three,
there had been no reports of the disease south of

(14:46):
San Salvador. While we don't know the reasons for sure,
this part of Central America wasn't as densely populated, with
fewer horses and no railroads to rapidly carry animals from
place to place before people realized they were sick. The
Panama Railroad was built in eighteen fifty five, but that
was well over one thousand kilometers away from the farthest

(15:08):
south the epizootic was reported. The epizootic also didn't cross oceans.
Given how quickly the illness struck, how fast it spread,
and how long it lasted, any animals being transported across
the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean likely would have recovered by
the time that ship arrived, or if not, their illness
would have been obvious enough to keep the animals quarantined

(15:31):
aboard the ship. A few places were exempt, and a
lot of those were islands. The epizootic never reached Prince
Edward Islands because the seas around it were impassable due
to ice. When the disease was active in neighboring parts
of Canada on the opposite side of the continent. Vancouver
Island established a quarantine and banned horses and mules from

(15:54):
being brought onto the island. There were also no signs
of the illness in Key West Flora. While the disease
did reach some Caribbean islands, it missed others, including Hispaniola
and Jamaica. Parts of Mexico also seem to have been
protected mainly by their geography, especially the southern part of

(16:14):
the Baja California Peninsula and much of the Yucatan Peninsula.
The rapid onset and dramatic infection rate of this disease
made it possible for people to see how it was spreading.
As this was happening, sometimes it was even possible to
trace which specific horses had been the likely carriers of
the disease as they were moved from place to place.

(16:36):
Here's a paragraph from a report that was prepared for
the US Department of Agriculture.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Quote. The first cases in Detroit were several sick horses
brought from Canada about the tenth or eleventh of October.
Others were attacked in less than two days, and the
malady appears to have been confined for nearly a week
to the two stables into which the Canadian beasts were brought.
The first cases in Syria our accused were in newly
arrived Canadian horses, and the malady spread promptly in city

(17:05):
and country. The earliest cases which I have been able
to trace in Ithaca were in the livery stables of
mister Jackson, who had just returned from running a mayor
in a more northern part of the state. In Pittsburgh,
the disease first appeared in the stables of Messrs Moreland
and Mitchell after the arrival of five or six horses
from New York, when the epizootic was then at its height.

(17:28):
In every instance, it spread rapidly in the new locality
from Washington, the first note of alarm was sounded on
October twenty eighth, to the effect that sick horses had
been brought into the city from the north, and on
November three it was reported to be generally prevalent. In
Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, the malady appeared about November fourth and

(17:49):
spread like fire along the canal and into the surrounding country.
On November nineteenth, it prevailed at points in Giles Rutherford,
Maury Davidson, and Sumner County's tennis which had been recently
visited by a circus coming from an infected locality, and
while the general district was free. At Newark, Delaware, the

(18:10):
first case was in a horse just arrived from Baltimore,
and others speedily followed. At Ellyria, Ohio, it was confined
for five days, and for five days only to teams
just back from Cleveland.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
In addition to tracing the spread like this, doctors, veterinarians,
and health and sanitary officials also tried to study the
disease itself, including culturing blood, urine and mucus from infected
horses and the air and the bedding of their stables.
Health officials in multiple cities did really systematic research into

(18:45):
the animals, their illnesses, and their environments. At the same time,
the nature of this disease made this tricky to do
and a lot of places, including New York, by the
time health officials ordered an investigation into what was happening,
the epizootic had already peaked, so the time to do
that research was really limited. Multiple papers and reports published

(19:07):
at the time looked at the question of whether the
epizootic was caused by some kind of atmospheric phenomenon or
heat or cold or humidity or some other condition, and
concluded that it was not it was communicable. It spread
very rapidly through the eastern half of North America, where
cities were bigger and more densely populated and more connected

(19:29):
via railroads. As it moved west, the disease still spread
along the Transatlantic Railroad, but without as many big cities
or connected railroads, it slowed down. In more recent years,
there have been projects to use geographic information system or
GIS mapping to trace the spread of the epizootic along
the rail lines, and those results are really dramatic. You're

(19:53):
just watching blobs of disease move follow the tracks. Not
really a number for the total horse population in the
entire area that was affected by this episootic, but according
to the US Census, there were more than seven million
horses in the United States in eighteen seventy, so two

(20:15):
years before the episootic, with the human population then more
than thirty eight million. The epizootics mortality rate was estimated
at about two percent, although it could be as high
as ten percent in some places, especially if horses were
kept in very overcrowded and unsanitary stables, or if they
were forced to work while they were sick. So it's

(20:38):
likely that in the United States alone, at least one
hundred and forty thousand horses died in this episootic.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
While the rest recovered. The time they were unable to
work caused some major issues in the places where they lived,
and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break
in eighteen seventy two. Cities in North America were hugely

(21:08):
reliant on horses. Steam engines had been developed in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and boats and trains were
increasingly being run on steam power. The same was true
of a lot of factories. It was increasingly common for
factories that needed some kind of power to run off
of steam engines rather than horses walking on treadmills or

(21:31):
something similar. But the public still had some concerns about steam,
specifically about the idea of steam boilers exploding in the
middle of a crowded street. This was not really an
unreasonable fear in the early days of steam technology, there
were things that needed to work out in terms of

(21:52):
state of safety. So consequently, a lot of cities banned
the use of steam engines on city streets to do
things like power cars and street cars, so horses were
still doing a lot of that work. A lot of
goods and people were being moved by train and ship,
but the coal to fuel those trains and ships was

(22:14):
being hauled by horses. The first practical automobiles were more
than a decade away, as were the first practical bicycles.
People traveled extensively on horseback or on horse drawn carriages.
In a lot of places, horse drawn wagons had replaced
hand carts for making deliveries and for carrying goods from
the port or the train depot. Horses pulled street cars,

(22:38):
fire engines, ambulances, and horses. Many of the canals of
the Great Lakes region were filled with barges that were
pulled by horses. In an era without effective refrigeration, a
lot of people relied on daily deliveries of milk and ice,
and those too were delivered thanks to horses. So when
cities entire populations of working horses got sick all at once,

(23:02):
it caused major problems. In New York City, for example,
the human population was about a million people and there
were about seventy thousand horses, and about fourteen thousand of
those horses worked on streetcar and stagecoach lines. Fourteen thousand
horses doing just that work for about three weeks, starting

(23:23):
on October twenty first, the city basically came to a standstill.
People and goods couldn't get where they needed to go,
at least not easily. Fifty teams of oxen were brought
in to try to help, but they were difficult to
manage on the city streets. Teams of men were also
hired to try to pull street cars and fire engines,

(23:43):
which was a lot harder and a lot slower than
using horses. The same thing happened in other cities besides
New York, including the oxen and the teams of men
trying to pull street cars. Newspaper coverage of some of
this makes it sound almost a bit humorous, or like
people valiantly trying to make the most of a bad situation,

(24:05):
but that wasn't the case everywhere. In some places, prisoners
were being forced to try to do the work of horses.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
On the West Coast, Asians, especially Chinese people, were being
targeted by vehement and sometimes violent racism. That's something that
we have talked about on the show recently. This was
just ten years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion
Act in San Francisco. Chinese people were hired to pull

(24:33):
wagons and carry cargo in place of horses, and then
they were written about in newspapers as though they were animals.
A big obnoxious irony here is that Chinese people had
already been moving a lot of cargo around San Francisco
without the use of horses. They were using poles or
baskets hung from poles. San Francisco had passed a law

(24:57):
banning this on public sidewalks in eighteen seven. That was
a law that didn't mention Chinese people specifically, but was
intentionally written to target them. Stevedores, deliverymen, and others who
relied on horses were basically out of work for about
three weeks when the episootics struck their city. The few
whose horses had not gotten sick or who forced their

(25:20):
horses to work anyway, often charged a premium for their services.
This led to complaints of price gouging, but in some
cases it was more that these workers still needed to
make ends meet if their horse could only work for
a couple hours instead of all day. That was all
the time they had to earn a living. For cities

(25:40):
where the street cars were being pulled by horses, the
few remaining street cars became badly overcrowded, and that made
them much more difficult and dangerous for those few remaining
horses to pull. In New York City, Henry Berg, founder
of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
had been given police powers in cases of animal abuse.

(26:04):
He and his deputies started patrolling the streets, inspecting working
horses for signs of illness or signs of injury from
pulling those overcrowded street cars, and they forced their handlers
to take the horses back to the stables if necessary.
A similar scene played out in Boston, with George Thorndike Angel,
founder of the Massachusetts SPCA, who dispatched teams to negotiate

(26:28):
with the street car drivers to let their sick horses rest.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
The effects of this shut down were wide reaching. The
presidential election was held on November fifth, at which point
horses were sick in much of the Northeast, and there
were concerns about people being able to get to the poles.
Loads of vegetables and fish rotted at ports because the
stevedores just couldn't move them. All mail service to and

(26:54):
through the western part of North America slowed to a crawl.
Mail made part of the journey by rail, but from
there horses and wagons often carried it hundreds of miles
to its final destination. On November ninth, eighteen seventy two,
a fire started in a basement and a warehouse in Boston,
and as it burned, it was fueled by gas explosions.

(27:17):
The fire departments horses were too sick to work, so
teams of men tried to pull the fire engines to
fight the blaze. This, of course, took a lot longer
than horses would have. This was one of several factors
that contributed to the spread of this fire. Others included
a lack of water pressure at a lot of the

(27:38):
fire hydrants, and the way the city itself had been built.
A lot of the buildings were really close together, and
many had wooden mansard roofs, so the fire spread really
easily between them. Eventually, gunpowder was used to collapse a
number of buildings to create a fire break. This fire
was not fully extinguished until November eleventh, Fourteen people died

(28:02):
and seven hundred and seventy six buildings were destroyed across
sixty five acres of the city. In the spring of
eighteen seventy three, the epizootics struck cavalry horses as the
United States was at war with the Apache Nation in
the Southwest and the Modoc Nation in what's now northern California,
forcing soldiers to fight on foot instead. Sources used in

(28:26):
this episode are contradictory regarding how much the epizootic impacted
Indigenous people's horses. At the same time, written records would
have come from reports from the Department of Indian Affairs,
which don't mention the epizootics impact on Indigenous peoples at all.
They may have been less affected. The disease spread extremely

(28:47):
easily among horses that were stabled together, but many Indigenous
people's horses were not stabled or were kept in individual
family dwellings rather than stabled together.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
There's also some speculation that the epizootic was one of
the contributing factors to the Panic of eighteen seventy three.
Other more widely cided factors in this panic are the
eighteen seventy Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the government
to buy silver every month that market prices, regardless of
how those prices fluctuated.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
The price of.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Gold was also legally linked to silver prices, and so
this led to financial disaster when the supply of silver
dramatically increased after the opening of several new silver mines
that led the price of gold to also plummet along
with the price of silver. Other issues included railroad failures,
including the failure of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. The

(29:46):
stock market crashed in May of eighteen seventy three, leading
to widespread unemployment and bank failures. In addition to equines,
the Great Episootic of eighteen seventy two caused some illnesses
in humans, typically humans who cared for or worked with animals.
It may have also caused illnesses in some other animals,

(30:07):
including pigs. There was an outbreak of.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Influenza in humans in eighteen seventy three and eighteen seventy four,
but it's not clear whether this was connected to the
equine outbreak that started in eighteen seventy two. There was
also a paper published in twenty ten that traced a
connection between the equine epizootic and a massive fatal epizootic

(30:31):
among domesticated birds in the last months of eighteen seventy two.
The first such outbreak was reported in Poughkeepsie, New York,
on November fifteenth, That was eighteen days after the equine
flu was reported in that same city. In a number
of cities, researchers found a pattern of outbreaks of avian

(30:51):
disease that started between twenty and thirty days after the
first report of horse disease. Most of them were in
that twenty to thirty day range, although there were some
intervals that were shorter or longer than that. Unlike in
the equine outbreak, the mortality rate in this outbreak was
close to one hundred percent. This paper speculates that this

(31:13):
could be an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza.
There's not nearly as much research into this avian episootic
as there is about the eighteen seventy two equine flu,
and this may be because of differences in attitudes about
birds and horses at the time and how these animals
were used and cared for. In general, flocks of chickens, ducks,

(31:37):
and similar birds were being kept on small farms, often
raised by wives and daughters. There was no national Poultry Growers'
Association or other national organization to take an interest in this, yet.
People also didn't typically seek veterinary care for birds like
they might have for a large animal like a horse.

(31:58):
We talked about shifts in the poultry into in the
US in our Chicken of Tomorrow episode in May of
twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
Other more recent research has looked at the genetic lineage
of influenza viruses and found evidence of a shift in
avian flu around the time that this episootic happened, with
the equine virus closely paralleling the avian virus. Researchers who
did this work did not conclude that the virus jumped

(32:25):
from horses to birds or vice versa, but they did
note that the avian and equine viruses seem to be
closely related. Equine influenza still exists today. It's endemic in
most of the world's horses, with the exception of horses
in Iceland and New Zealand. Vaccines were developed in the
nineteen seventies and have been refined since then. These are

(32:47):
typically given annually like a seasonal flu vaccine in humans,
although horses that are high risk in some way may
be vaccinated every six months instead of annually. There's also
more surveillance and monitoring of equine influenza today. This is
handled country by country, but the World Health Organization and
World Organization for Animal Health are also involved. Today, most

(33:12):
of the world is not nearly as reliant on the
labor of horses as North America was at the end
of the nineteenth century, but major equine flu outbreaks can
still cause a lot of issues and expense. In two
thousand and seven, an outbreak of equine influenza virus struck Australia.
This was the first known incidents of the disease there,

(33:35):
so the horses had not been vaccinated. This was probably
introduced to Australia by Japanese race horses that had been
quarantined on arrival, but the illness spread at and then
beyond the quarantine site. The biggest impact with this was
on race horses, but later cost analysis showed that governments
in Australia had spent five hundred and seventy one million

(33:58):
dollars eradicating the disease. Ease including three hundred and seventy
million dollars in compensation to offset the disruption to the
horse industry.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Not the most chipper story, but still super interesting. Do
you have listener mail to go along with it? I
do kind of.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
So we had a number of people comments on our
social media in some way about whether we could post
the recipe for the sugar cookies that we talked about
in our nutmeg episode. That's months ago now, and I
did not answer any of the comments and they are
now lost to time. So everyone get a pen and paper.

(34:43):
Two and a half cups sifted flour. It is written
that way, but in my experience, you need to measure
first then sift, not try to sift then measure with
this recipe. So two and a half cups sifted flour,
two teaspoons baking powder, one half teaspoon nutmeg, one half
cup butter, one cup sugar, two eggs well beaten, one

(35:08):
teaspoon vanilla, one tablespoon cream. Great thing about this is
that then you have a whole thing of cream to
do whatever you want with after you've used that one
tablespoons super delicious coffee. Uh yeah, that's one of the
things that I do after making these. Okay, so those

(35:29):
are the ingredients. Now, Sift flour, baking powder, and nutmeg
together twice, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Add eggs, vanilla and cream. Beat well. Add flour mixture, gradually,
beating after each addition until smooth. Form dough into a
brick shape. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm.

(35:53):
Roll out on a floured surface. Cut into desired shape
with cookie cutter. Sprinkle with granulated or color sugar. Placed
on greased baking sheet. Make at three hundred and seventy
five degrees for about seven minutes. Yields two and a
half dozen cookies. Some things from my experience making this recipe,

(36:14):
I usually do them on parchment instead of a greased
cookie sheet. There is definitely a sweet spot in how
firm you want the dough to be to roll it out,
and this recipe can be very tricky to make in
a very warm kitchen because the dough gets too soft
if you just leave it on the counter between matches

(36:37):
in the oven to roll things out, and putting it
in the fridge for that whole time can make it
cross into the slightly too firm side so you just
got to kind of find that sweet spot and how
soft the dough is and try to like maintain it
at that temperature.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
So that is the recipe.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
This is from a little booklet that my mom made
about the holiday traditions and our family, and I pulled
it out that I used this booklet basically for the
sugar cookies recipe at this point. But I pulled it
out and was flipping through it before we recorded today,
and it made me a little teary looking at all

(37:18):
these things that my mom wrote up about our family traditions.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
So yeah, it was very sweet.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
So yeah, if anybody makes these sugar cookies, let me
know how they turned out. My mom would be totally
fine with me sharing this recipe with people.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
She literally put.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
It in a little booklet that she gave away. If
you would like to send us the notes, we are
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed

(37:59):
in History Classes, a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,

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