3-052-317 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Prize oxen at the Smithfield Club Cattle Show, 1872. 'The...Show, at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, has been noticed with satisfaction, this seventy-fourth year of its recurrence, as the best in quality ever yet seen. Two of the finest beasts there exhibited figure handsomely on a page of this Christmas Number; and a piece of their beef will...make an excellent Christmas dish. The hornless animal in the front of our Engraving was the champion of the whole show: a black ox of the polled Aberdeen breed, aged three years and eight months, sent up by Mr. James Bruce, of Burnside, Fochabers, Elgin. It was bred by Mr. John M'Pherson, of Achlochroch, Dufftown, and was fed on grass, turnips, hay, beans, meal, oatcake, and Thorley's cattle food. The other...gained the first prize for horned Scotch steers and oxen of any age. It was bred and exhibited by the Duke of Sutherland; and its food, at Dunrobin, was turnips linseed-cake, beans, Indian corn, and barley, upon which it lived and throve to the age of four years and two months. The Devons upon this occasion were altogether considered of equally good quality with the oxen from North Britain, and the judges had a difficult task to choose between individual specimens of the two country breeds'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.