STALLIONS, BROOD MARES AND FOALS. Ill 



the wear and tear of show-yard -preparation better than most 

 of the agricultural horses. A considerable number of prom- 

 ising young cart horses and mares at the Royal Meeting at 

 Bristol were overlaid with beef and fat to the detriment of 

 usefulness and soundness Abundant illustration of the evil 

 is seen at every large show. Several of the Bristol contin- 

 gent were sadly gummy and itchy about their legs: several 

 were puffed and full in their hocks, looking as if they had 

 been strained, and had got both bog spavins and thorough- 

 pins; from the same senseless high feeding several had early 

 developed sidebones. Yet, even with these notable defects 

 doubtless regarded by the judges as temporary, and not he- 

 reditaryseveral horses at Bristol managed to gain the 

 coveted rosettes. Can judges and stewards at important 

 meetings do nothing to carry into effect the sensible rules 

 generally laid down in their printed programme as to over- 

 feeding, but systematically ignored? Cannot symmetry, style, 

 and usefulness be fairly estimated without dangerously over- 

 loading the animal with beef and fat? Should it be essential 

 to the successful exhibition of a good horse or bull that for 

 months he should drink, as many do, two or three gallons of 

 cow's milk daily? This artificial treatment greatly improves 

 the looks of plain, flat-sided, weak-loined subjects; but it 

 cannot give the essential shape, style, and action; and besides 

 the ailments already mentioned it engenders in horses, as in 

 other animals, liability to anthrax or blood poisoning, of 

 which quarter evil and splenic apoplexy in cattle are the 

 most familiar examples. Many gross, overfed horses suffer 

 from similar conditions; they take what at first appears to 

 be a simple cold; the throat becomes very sore, congestion, 

 rapidly followed by extravasation of blood, occurs through- 

 out the lining membrane of the air passages; treatment in 

 such gross, overfed subjects is singularly unsuccessful, and in 

 fifteen or twenty hours the patient dies, suffocated from pul- 

 monary apoplexy. Among the young horses got up for town 

 sale, as well as those sacrificed to showing, it is wonderful to 

 observe the amount of fat laid on, not only externally, but 

 around the internal organs. The omentum of a four-year- 

 old cart horse is sometimes overlaid with four or five inches 



