LAMENESS. 3 



and uidainiriatioii of muscular fibre, disease of the structures pecu- 

 liar to the foot, faults or accidents in shoeing, contusions, wounds 

 of all sorts, tumours, ulcerations, fractures, dislocations, spasm, 

 paralysis, &c. A catalogue sufficient to shew that the causes of 

 lameness are many in number, and equally various in kind as 

 well as degree, some being altogether as simple in their character 

 as others are complex and obscure. 



It is Pain that commonly produces the Lameness. — The 

 animal feels the pain either when he moves his lame limb or 

 when he bears weight or presses upon it, and he uses his endea- 

 vour in the course of progression to avoid giving himself pain, or 

 to mitigate it as much as possible; and it is this endeavour that 

 accounts for his stepping short, or treading light, or for using his 

 limb in such manner that the bearing comes most upon the heel 

 or upon the toe, upon the outer or upon the inner side of the 

 ibot; — that accounts, in short, for his flinching, and thereby evincing 

 lameness. Pain being the natural product of inflammation, acute 

 disease of any kind attacking one of the limbs can hardly fail to 

 be attended with lameness. This accounts for disease being the 

 ordinary cause of lameness, at the same time that it lessens any 

 surprise we might entertain at the great variety there exists in 

 the degrees of intensity of lameness manifested, setting at one 

 end of the scale the lameness which is so slight or transitory that 

 the acutest veterinarians will dispute about its existence, and at 

 the other end that which has characteristically received the deno- 

 mination of dead lameness. Pain, though commonly the result of 

 inflammation, may however, exist, occasioning lameness of a most 

 unbearable character, without it; the cases of the stone in the 

 foot and the tight shoe being, as was before observed, examples 

 of this. Another illustration is likewise afforded by the kick one 

 horse every now and then receives from another horse upon his 

 cannon bone ; than which, as every body knows, nothing for the 

 time causes more exquisite pain or produces greater lameness. 



Inability, in one form or another, in the absence of pain, will 

 be found to be the proximate cause of lameness. The dislocation of 

 the patella occasions no pain, and yet the horse is too lame even to 

 move. The partial or complete anchylosis of a joint may cease to 



