34 Veterinary Medicine. 



attack indiscriminately all who approach him, or reserve his ill- 

 will for particular individuals, and then he often acts under a 

 feeling of revenge for ill-usage from this individual or some one 

 he conceives him to represent. 



In some cases viciousness is inherited and certain families have 

 a bad reputation in this respect. It may be either a survival of 

 the ancestral disposition of the wild horse, or it may be a trait 

 developed by ill-usage of a team of more immediate ancestors. 



In other cases the habit is acquired by the individual himself, 

 and in such cases it may be due to brutal treatment at the hands 

 of man ; to a continuous punishment of a high-spirited horse 

 leading to resentment and retaliation ; to acute pain in boils, 

 abrasions or other sores in the root of the mane, or the shoulder, 

 or the back, where pressed on by the collar or saddle ; or to the 

 generative excitement of mares in heat. In many such cases the 

 vice lasts only during the persistence of the cause, in others it 

 becomes permanent. The stallion is much more disposed to 

 aggressive vice than the gelding. 



Whether we may consider the vice a disease or not, it becomes 

 a habit engrained in the nature, the nerve centres tending to re- 

 produce their habitual acts indefinitely, so that we may look on 

 the condition as a psychosis which is too often incurable. 



Responsibility of the owner. Dangerous aggressive vice is 

 too self-evident to the buyer to constitute a good cause for an- 

 nulling a sale, but it has this legal bearing, that the owner who 

 keeps an animal known to be vicious, renders himself responsible 

 for whatever injury to man or beast he may perpetrate. Thus 

 the vicious stallion, bull or dog in a public place which damages 

 person or property, renders his owner liable to the extent of such 

 damages. This, of course, must be largely qualified by the at- 

 tendant circumstances. The man employed to take care of a 

 horse, knows his habits as fully as the owner, takes his chances 

 and should exercise due precautions to avoid danger. The per- 

 son who enters a stall carele.s.sly without speaking to the horse, 

 seeing that he stands over, or otherwise responds to his call, is 

 himself to blame if he gets kicked. The attendant who does 

 things to a dangerous or questionable horse for mere bravado 

 cannot blame the owner if he gets himself injured. If a person 

 teases a horse so as to tempt him to retaliate, not only is he re- 



