FITTING FOR SHOW. 145 



fed a great variety of food and suffer no ill con- 

 sequences and the variation of the grain will 

 coax him to eat with greater relish. I do not 

 advocate this kind of feeding. I will describe 

 the methods in vogue some years ago by a firm 

 whose fame is worldwide, whose prize-winning 

 record placed it clearly in the forefront among 

 its contemporaries and whose losses by death 

 from colic and kindred troubles were enormous. 

 In the morning about five the horses were 

 given crushed oats and bran, fed dampened 

 with cut hay— enough to fill a common stable 

 bucket. At ten in the forenoon they got whole 

 oats, bran and cut hay. At two in the afternoon 

 they got the same feed as in the early morning 

 and around six in the evening they got boiled 

 barley, crushed oats, ground corn, oilmeal and 

 cut hay, and usually some roots boiled with the 

 barley. The feeder was a man of great experi- 

 ence and highly competent in every way. I 

 should judge that the horse got from 16 to 20 

 pounds of grain and bran each day and only 

 very moderate exercise. Often as the time of 

 showing approached this feeding was supple- 

 'mented by the traditional drink at nine o'clock 

 at night. This consisted of the jelly made 

 from perhaps a pint of oilmeal, a couple of 

 pounds of oatmeal, half a pound of molasses 

 and water or milk to make something more than 

 half a bucketful. With all this the individual 

 caretakers would oftentimes feed extra grain 



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