42 A MANUAL OF TOY DOGS 



whites, over 6 Ibs. and under 8 Ibs., there are now many, 

 and good ; especially in a certain west-country kennel ; 

 but some of the best are dangerously near the limit of 

 weights. 



The " tear-channels " which led to this digression 

 can be helped not to exist by using a boracic acid lotion 

 to the eye ; but the stains are often ineffaceable. 



CHAPTER VIII 



AILMENTS AND ILLNESSES 



Anaemia a condition of general depression in health, 

 with impoverishment of the blood is of all serious 

 diseases the most common among dogs. It is this 

 condition that causes dogs to have worms ; it is this 

 deficiency in the blood supply, both in quantity and 

 quality, which brings about ninety out of every hundred 

 cases of skin disease. The original cause of the disease 

 in toy dogs was the way in which they were, and un- 

 fortunately often still are, kept, fed, and housed. A 

 number of dogs kept together in some artificially-heated 

 building, confined in small pens, obliged to breathe 

 impure air, and fed on Indian meal, biscuits, oatmeal, 

 and other cereals, with little or no meat this is kennel 

 life, and a splendid foundation for anaemia. We all 

 know how worms and eczema and other skin troubles 

 beset toys kept " in kennels," but not until the know- 

 ledge has caused people to give up keeping them thus, 

 and handing on hereditary eczema and hereditarily 

 vitiated blood to their puppies, shall we get rid of the 

 inherited tendency to poverty of blood which makes 

 so many toy dogs possessions of anxiety rather than 

 sources of satisfaction to their owners. 



If a law could be passed obliging all dogs to receive a 

 suitable daily allowance of good, fresh, underdone meat, 

 and abolishing farinaceous feeding altogether, even for 

 nve years, it is not too much to say that at the end of 



