In 1881, Louis Pasteur announced his theory that vaccinating livestock, in effect giving animals a disease, would protect them from that disease. Many contemporaries of Pasteur were skeptical about this radical idea as they were skeptical about the germ theory of disease. One of these contemporaries, the famous veterinarian Monsieur H. Rossignol, challenged Pasteur to test his theory in public by vaccinating animals on his farm at Pouilly-Le-Fort, a small village outside Paris.