302 A TREATISE ON HORSE-BREEDING. 



abundant this usually serves every purpose. But from 

 various causes this milk may be deficient in amount or al- 

 tered in quality and may fail to produce free evacuation of 

 the bowels. Then follow costiveness, impaction of the bowels 

 with the waste products of the digestion of milk, decomposi- 

 tion of these products, impairment or alteration of the secre- 

 tions of the whole digestive apparatus, and, finally, irrita- 

 tion, excessive watery secretion, unnaturally active move- 

 ments of the bowels, perhaps even inflammation, and, of 

 course, scouring. For this condition, which is a very com- 

 mon one, the preventive is to watch the foal closely for the 

 first twenty-four hours, and if the bowels are not freely 

 moved to give a dose of three ounces of castor or olive oil 

 with a teaspoonful of laudanum. 



In the young the liver is relatively far larger and more 

 active than in the adult. As might be expected, it is at the 

 same time more liable to disorder. In many cases of indi- 

 gestion in young foals the extreme fcetor of the discharges, 

 the coated appearance of the tongue, and the yellowness of 

 the membranes of the eyes and nose, testify to the existence 

 of this derangement. In such cases after the operation of 

 the oil much good may often be derived from one grain of 

 calomel and twelve grains of chalk intimately mixed and re- 

 peated two or three times a day. 



Anything that affects the general health of the mare is 

 liable to modify the milk. When mares are used in harness 

 during lactation it occasionally happens that a fretful ani- 

 mal becomes so fevered that the quality of the milk is ma- 

 terially altered, and the foal, coming to her hungry, gorges 

 itself with what acts like a veritable poison, inducing indi- 

 gestion, with skin eruptions or diarrhoea. So it is with 

 other unhealthy conditions of the mother. In all febrile, 

 wasting, or disordered states, the milk is more or less al- 

 tered, and every such alteration is a threat to the sound di- 

 gestion of the foal and may prove a proximate cause of scour- 

 ing. With some it is a common practice after the mare has 

 been excited by work to keep the foal apart until all the 

 milk found in the bag has been drawn off, since they justly 

 conclude that what is secreted later, when the period of ex- 



