# An Examen of Witches/Chapter 33

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Chapter XXXIII.
How Witches Afflict the Herds.
What we have said in the foregoing chapters principally concerns mankind; but we must to some extent treat in particular of Cattle, the Crops, and the Fruits of the earth. Let us start, then, with Cattle
Witches have many and various ways of injuring cattle, and these methods are in some part the same as those of which we have already spoken. For with a powder, an ointment, a glance of the eye, a word, a touch with the hand or a wand, they will make the beast ill or cause it to die; and of this we have recounted several examples in Chapters 23, 24 and the following chapters.
​At other times they deprive the animal of milk; and this they do with the help of Satan by giving it certain noxious herbs to eat, which dry up and keep back its milk. Or else, at the moment when the animal begins to give milk, Satan takes it from its teat. Also they cause the milk of one cow to go into the udder of another, as it is said. Clauda Vernier, known as la Montagne, wife of Pierre Vernier, known as Billet des Granges, who was burned at Dôle about thirty years ago, confessed that she used to cause the milk of her neighbour’s cows to flow in this way into the udders of her own. And this is why Antoine Tornier, when she was threatening Jacquema Paget, said that her cows were yielding twice as much milk as her own. But we can only believe that in this case Satan, in the manner we have said, causes one of the cows to lose its milk, and on the contrary causes that of the other to increase twofold by the means of certain beneficial herbs which he gives it to eat, such as Cytisus and other such. Or else he takes the milk from one cow, and when the other is being milked he comes with his milk, which he pours so skilfully into the pail that it appears to come from the second cow’s teats.
For such is commonly his practice in the matter of wine according to Sprenger, who says that once the bottles of a witch, which were empty, became full of wine in a moment; for it is likely that Satan had taken that wine from some cellar to fill the bottles with it.
Here I must recount a strange and devilish remedy used by Christine, the chambermaid of Theodore Lopers, Vicar of the Hospital of Kreveld, when three of her cows had lost their ​milk. She sent them in front of the house of the woman whom she suspected of having caused the loss of their milk, having first bidden them to go in the name of, etc.; and when they were in front of the house they remained there for some time lowing continually, and then came back with their milk restored.
Now there is one sign, among others, by which it may be known whether an animal has been bewitched, namely, when it dies in a state of frenzy. This is what happened to a hen belonging to Rollande du Vernois: for this woman had two hens, and one day she refused Groz-Jacques Bocquet an egg; whereupon Groz-Jacques, meaning to kill her hens, threw them some crumbs of bread which he had dusted with a powder; and when they had eaten them, the two hens at once died. But one of them, before dying, threw itself to the ground and leaped and climbed against the walls in such a way that it was thought to be mad. The same thing happened to several horses which Antoine Tornier and Clauda Coirieres had bewitched. Vegece also says that a bewitched animal is sad and heavy, and that it grows thin and falls ill if it be not helped by natural remedies.