CHAPTER XII. 



HOW TO BKEAK AND USE A HORSE. 



"WHAT IS REQUIRED IN A "WELL-BROKEN HORSE — HIS EDUCATION SHOULD 

 COMMENCE WHEN A COLT — BITTING — PU'lTING HIM IN HARNESS — HOW TO 

 USE A HORSE — TRAVELLING— WORKING — PLEASURE HORSES— PUNISHMENTS. 



It is not too much to say, that not one horse in a hun- 

 dred, if one in a thousand, in the United States, is ever 

 properly broken ; or one in fifty, when offered for sale as 

 a finished horse, entered in the merest rudiments of his 

 education. Horses in America, — we cannot say wherefore, 

 but, perhaps, from the general absence of a very high de- 

 gree of blood, from the general absence of extremely high 

 and stimulating feeding and grooming, which not only 

 act directly on the individual horse, but exert an influence, 

 increasing generation after generation, over the progeny 

 of horses long kept up in an unnatural condition, — are 

 very rarely actively, and almost never savagely, vicious. 

 Nothing more than this, as a general thing, is required. 

 If a horse will carry his rider without kicking him over 

 his head, or draw him in his wagon or buggy without 

 kicking it to shivers ; if he >vill go off at a walk, increase 

 his speed to the top of his gait, and stop again when pulled 

 upon, without running away ; if he will hold back going 

 down hill, and if he will not balk going up hill; and 

 more particularly, if he will stand at a door without tying, 

 he is held to be firily broken, and is willingly received, 

 credited, and paid for as such. 



It is needless, however, to say to a real horseman, that 

 such a horse is as far as possible from being broken at all, 

 especially from being well broken. To be really well broken, 



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