182 TRAINING THE TROTTING HORSE. 



CHAPTEK XY. 



A CHAPTER ON EARLY TRAINING — THE SUBJECT CONSIDERED 



IN VARIOUS PHASES HIRAM WOODRUFF AND HIS DAY 



THE ADVANCE SINCE THEN TROTTERS NOW COME TO 



THEIR SPEED EARLY THE PREJUDICE AGAINST EARLY 



TRAINING PASSING AWAY A PRACTICAL NECESSITY 



WITH BREEDERS WHO BREED FOR PROFIT TIME THAT 



MEANS MONEY THE BENEFITS OF EARLY TRAINING 



ARE LASTING — IT MUST NOT BE OVERDONE THE PAST 



AND PRESENT CONTRASTED. 



The first man to earn a name as a trainer of trotting 

 horses, and to publish his experiences and his opinions, 

 was Hiram Woodruff, and his book — " The Trotting 

 Horse of America" — is read as a standard work to-daj, 

 though Woodruff has been under the Long Island sod 

 for over twenty years, and the crude methods of his 

 day have been reduced to quite a fine art. I Ijave no 

 desire to speak other than respectfully of the pioneer 

 of our profession or of his work. Trotting, me might 

 say, was born in his day, and he had not, as we now 

 have, the experiences and examples of others to profit 

 by. In all horse-training for speed there are general 

 principles that always apply, and the work that con- 

 fronted Hiram Woodruff and the other trainers of his 

 generation was to modify the principles of training the 

 race-horse to suit the development of speed in the 

 trotter. And though these methods were crude, as all 



