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| Mosquito Swarm [Click to see closer...if you dare!] |
The newspaper article excerpt below describes a truly horrifying situation. I hate to think of the suffering the poor animals had to endure, ending in their deaths...
Many horses have died in Kittson County the past week or 10 days. Recently, examination of one of the dead animals showed the presence of hundreds of mosquitos in the lungs of the animal. This year the pests are in evidence by billions. The rural sections, where grass is growing, is simply alive with huge swarms of them. It is presumed horses could not breath without inhaling hundreds of them, which in turn set up infection, killing them.
From: Kittson County Enterprise (1937) - Which was ironically the same year that the first definitive work on mosquitoes in Minnesota was written by Dr. William Owen of the University of Minnesota.
We used to build smudges for the horses when the skeeters were really bad. They would stand with their head as close to the fire as they could so their body was almost invisible in the smoke. Fly spray didn't seem to help for very long against those bloodsuckers!
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