CHAPTER XV 

 BLANKETING 



^ I ^O blanket a horse properly you must sympathize 

 -*■ with him. Feel of his ears occasionally to learn if 

 they are cold, and notice the appearance of his coat. 

 There is an immense difference in the amount of 

 blanketing that two horses in the same stable will need. 

 A thin-coated horse will, of course, need much more 

 than a heavy-coated one as a rule; but the greatest dif- 

 ference is between young and old horses. An old 

 horse, like an old man, feels the cold. I have known a 

 young clipped horse to be perfectly comfortable under 

 circumstances where an old horse with a heavy coat 

 would feel uncomfortably cold. 



The only safe way to treat a horse is to treat him as 

 you do yourself. As the famous trainer John Splan 

 remarks, " If it is a cold night and you need an extra 

 blanket on your bed, give the horse an extra one too." 

 On cold nights In late summer and early autumn most 

 persons do not blanket their horses, but at those times 

 the horse has a thin coat and suffers from the cold just 

 as much as would a man who had no more covering on 

 his bed than he had on a hot night in June or July. If, 

 on a frosty morning, you go into a stable where the 

 horses are not blanketed, you will notice that their 

 hair is standing up and that their ears are cold. More- 

 over, the blanketing of horses early in the autumn and 



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