salt, verb

Forms:
Also sault.
Origin:
EnglishShow more Probably special senses of English salt to preserve, to cure.
a. transitive. To render (an animal) immune to disease by allowing it to suffer a disease, or by inoculation. Also figurative. See also salted.
1864 T. Baines Explor. in S.-W. Afr. 418He asked carefully ‘whether the horse was salted’ (i.e. acclimatised by having recovered from the horse sickness).
1878 P. Gillmore Great Thirst Land 59In purchasing cattle up the country,..it is customary to obtain a guarantee that a horse is saulted, or an ox over the lung-sickness.
1898 Cape of G.H. Agric. Jrnl 9 Jan. 6The expression to salt a beast means to render the animal immune to the disease, to immunize him.
1903 D. Blackburn Burgher Quixote 52The young Burghers..had learned to drink whiskey in Johannesburg and at Krugersdorp, and were thus poison-proof, being, so to speak, salted.
1911 J.F. Pentz in Farmer’s Weekly 11 Oct. 158 (letter)It is very clear that no cattle can be ‘salted’ for lam-gallziekte.
1929 J. Stevenson-Hamilton Low-Veld 18A horse or mule ‘salted’, implies one which, having previously contracted the disease, is amongst the lucky 5 per cent or 6 per cent which survive.
1937 B.H. Dicke Bush Speaks 296With the lung sickness they had found that, if an incision was made into the end of the animal’s tail, and a piece of diseased lung was tied to the wound.., a mild form of the sickness manifested itself from which the animals easily recovered and..such animals became immune to the contagion, became what was called ‘salted’.
1940 F.B. Young City of Gold 66I’ll give you eight yoke of oxen and guarantee they’re all sound in hoof and limb and salted for lung-sickness.
1974 A.P. Cartwright By Waters of Letaba 9The horse sickness spelt death to any horse that had not been ‘salted’.
1986 W. Steenkamp Blake’s Woman 87He’s broken to hunting..and he’s salted, which means he is immune to the horse-sickness.
b. intransitive. Of an animal: to become immune to a disease by contracting it and surviving.
1882 S. Heckford Lady Trader in Tvl 57It was very difficult to get horses, owing to the fact of the ‘horse disease’ being so very bad..that very few horses ever ‘salted’, i.e. recovered from the disease.
1912 S. Afr. Agric. Jrnl July 54All farmers agree that cattle which recover [from lamsiekte] do not salt from the disease, in other words, there is no immunity.
To render (an animal) immune to disease by allowing it to suffer a disease, or by inoculation. Also figurative.
to become immune to a disease by contracting it and surviving.
Derivatives:
Hence salting  verbal noun, immunizing.
1871 J. Mackenzie Ten Yrs N. of Orange River 262Horses are now safe far to the north of this district: there is no annual return of the disease...The ‘salting’ of the districts where the disease has thus become mitigated, does not stand good in the interior.
1899 ‘S. Erasmus’ Prinsloo 39These rascally Englanders...gave out to Magato that they were doctors who could vaccinate, which is salting for the small-pox.
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18641986

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salting

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figurative or allusive
salmon, nounn.saltbush, nounn.
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