ON FEEDING TOYS 21 



their fullest and sleep for hours afterwards ; and then 

 take hard exercise. 



It is quite a modern theory that the sins formerly 

 laid to the charge of meat are all unproven, but it is a 

 perfectly just one. Not only do skin complaints arise 

 from malnutrition, or from improper feeding, or a too 

 large amount of starchy food, but a cure for them is 

 frequently found in changing the diet to one of raw 

 or underdone meat only. This is modern veterinary 

 practice, as set forth by the cleverest man of the day 

 Mr. Sewell and others whose ability is unquestioned ; 

 in the olden times the vet's invariable dictum, whether 

 he understood the case or not and generally he was 

 in dense ignorance as to whether mange, eczema, or 

 erythema was the trouble was " No meat !" This 

 idea, like others primarily due to ignorance, dies hard, 

 and these are still to be found people who, ignoring the 

 way a dog's teeth are formed, pronounce his proper 

 diet to be farinaceous, notwithstanding the fact that 

 he was created among the carnivora. Of course, we 

 cannot keep a house pet, altered by centuries of evolu- 

 tion, just as Nature kept him, on raw flesh for one 

 thing, because he is not living the same sort of life ; 

 but the conditions are not so different as to have turned 

 a flesh-eating animal into a graminivorous one. 



I write, as I feel, strongly on this subject ; for many 

 a time have I been vexed to see how obstinacy in com- 

 pelling a dog to live on utterly unnatural food, has 

 made a miserable creature of one that would have been 

 happy, properly fed ; and the same applies to many a 

 litter of puppies. 



It has long been a common habit to feed puppies on 

 sloppy, farinaceous food, even up to the time when they 

 are well on in getting their permanent teeth ; if this is a 

 mistake with larger dogs, it is a grievous folly with toys. 

 People feed their pups four or five times a day on watery 

 bread and milk, Indian corn meal and oatmeal, and 

 powdered biscuit, all slopped with milk ; they may even 

 leave it about all day. Some of the puppies, the greedy 



