TO CURE JIBBING. 107 



things, and do even-thing wrong through fear. As long 

 'as you are calm, and keep down the excitement of the 

 horse, there are ten chances that you will make him 

 understand you, where there would not be one under 

 harsh treatment ; and then the little flare up will not 

 carry with it any unfavourable recollections, and he will 

 soon forget all about it, and learn to pull truly. Almost 

 every wrong act the horse commits is from mismanage- 

 ment, fear, or excitement : one harsh word will so excite 

 a nervous horse as to increase his pulse ten beats in a 

 minute. 



When we remember that we are dealing with dumb 

 brutes, and reflect how difficult it must be for them to 

 understand our motions, signs, and language, we should 

 never get out of patience with them because they don't 

 understand us, or wonder at their doing things wrong. 

 With all our intellect, if we were placed in the horse's 

 situation, it would be difficult for us to understand the 

 driving of some foreigner, of foreign ways and foreign 

 language. We should always recollect tliat our ways 

 and language are just as foreign and unknown to the 

 horse as any language in the world is to us, and should 

 try to practise what we could understand were we the 

 horse, endeavouring by some simple means to work on 

 his understanding rather than on the different parts of 

 his body. All baulked horses can be stalled true and 

 steady in a few minutes' time : they are all willing to 

 pull as soon as they know how, and I never yet found a 

 baulked horse that I could not teach to start his load in 

 fifteen, and often less than three, minutes' time. 



Almost any team, when first baulked, will start kindly 

 if you let them stand five or ten minutes as though there 

 was nothing wrong, and then speak to them with a 

 steady voice, and turn them a little to the right or left, 



