WHEN the Apostle says, “Does God care|about oxen?” [1 Cor. 9:9], he means to imply that everything is subject to God's providence, including both humans and domestic animals, and God preserves each of these categories after its measure, as the psalmist says, and the children of humans are clearly guided under the protection and covering of His wings to a greater degree [Psalm 35:7 – 8]. If, I say, sorcerers afflict humans, including the innocent and righteous and the sinners and parents through their children, who are part of their property, then a fortiori since domestic animals and the fruits of the earth are likewise part of the property of humans, clearly no one would presume to doubt that with the co-operation of God's permission sorceresses can inflict various forms of harm on them too. In this way, Job was stricken by the Devil, so that he lost all his domestic animals. In this way, the smallest village can be found in which women do not cease to taint each other's cows, to deprive them of milk and very often to kill them, though they start with the smallest kind of harm, which one can guess is the deprivation of milk.

If there is a question about the method by which they can achieve this, the response can be given that according to Albert (Animals, Bk. 3 [3. 2. 9]), in any animal milk works on a monthly cycle like any other flow in a woman, and when such a flow is not restrained by some weakness or as a result of the state of nature or of an incidental illness, it is by the working of sorcery that it is restrained or sometimes removed. Milk is restrained as a result of the natural state after the conception of a fetus and as a result of an incidental illness, like the many ways that this happens as a result of eating some plant that has the natural ability to restrain milk or to alter a cow.