1-02 WATER. 



might set out in the morning after a very small portion of 

 grain has been given to him, or perhaps only a little hay 

 One of the most successful methods of enabling a horse to get 

 well through a long journey, is to give him only a little at a 

 time while on the road, and at night to indulge him with a 

 double feed of grain and a full allowance of beans. 



Water. — This is a part of stable management little re- 

 garded by the farmer. He lets his horses loose morning and 

 ni2"ht, and they go to the nearest pond or brook and drink 

 their fill, and no harm results, for they obtain that kind of 

 water which nature designed them to have, in a manner pre- 

 pared for them by some unknown influence of the atmosphere, 

 as well as by the deposition of many saline admixtures. The 

 difference between hard and soft water is known to every one. 

 In hard water, soap will curdle, vegetables will not boil soft, 

 and the saccharine matter of the malt cannot be fully ob- 

 tained in the process of brewing. There is nothing in which 

 the different effect of hard and soft water is so evident, as in 

 the stomach and digestive organs of the horse. Hard water, 

 drawn fresh from the well, will assuredly make the coat of 

 a horse unaccustomed to it stare, and it will not unfrequently 

 gripe and otherwise injure him. Instinct or experience has 

 made even the horse himself conscious of this, for he will 

 never drink hard water if he has access to soft, and he will 

 leave the most transparent and pure water of the well for a 

 river, although the stream may be turbid, and even for the 

 muddiest pool.*" He is injured, however, not so much by the 

 hardness of the well-water as by its coldness — particularly by 

 its coldness in summer, and when it is in many degrees below 

 the temperature of the atmosphere. The water in the brook 

 and the pond being warmed by long exposure to the air, as well 

 as having become soft, the horse drinks freely of it without 

 danger. 



If the horse were watered three times a day, and especially 

 in summer, he would often be saved from the sad torture of 

 thirst, and from many a disease. Whoever has observed the 

 eagerness with which the over-worked horse, hot and .tired, 

 plunges his muzzle into the pail, and the difficulty of stopping 

 him until he has drained the last drop, may form some idea of what 

 he had previously suffereidfend will not wonder at the violent 

 spasms, and inflammation, and sudden death, that often result. 



There is a prejudice in the minds of many persons against tho 



* Some trainers have so much fear of hard or strange water, that they 

 carr^ ■;\'itli them to the different courses the water that the animal has been 

 accustomed to drink, and that which they know agrees with it. 



