CHAP. v. WEANING OF FOALS. 431 



CHAPTER V. 



ON THE REARING AND TRAINING OF COLTS. 



DURING the first summer the foals may be allowed to run with 

 their dams until Michaelmas, or even longer if the weather 

 continues mild and open. They should then be weaned and kept in 

 fold-yards, or paddocks containing open sheds, with low racks and 

 mangers for receiving their food, which ought, at first, to be the 

 sweetest hay that can be procured. Where rowen or aftermath is 

 available, it will furnish a succulent and invigorating article of diet : 

 ha} r and rowen, bran, oats, or pollard, or a moderate quantity of bean- 

 meal the proportions varying with circumstances will constitute the 

 staple food. By feeding young colts with oats, in conjunction with 

 other food, they acquire more rapid growth, and greater strength, than 

 when they are fed only with bran and hay ; and will also be enabled to 

 endure greater severity of weather. The corn, of every kind, should 

 be previously bruised in a mill. It may be assumed as an axiom, that 

 there is no greater error in the breeding of animals, than the too 

 common one of stinting them during the early part of their growth. 

 It is at this period that they require the greatest nourishment, and if 

 it is withheld they will be injured in their constitution, and conse- 

 quently in their value, to a far greater extent than can be repaid by 

 any possible saving in their food. To no animal does this remark 

 apply more forcibly than to the horse. 



It is a common practice, on weaning foals, to put them into warm 

 stables during the following winter, from a notion that they are not, at 

 that early age, able to support the cold of an open shed. Whether 

 this may be judicious with regard to the more tender breeds of racing 

 horses, it is not our present object to inquire ; but with respect to the 

 progeny of the dray-horse, the cart-horse, or the roadster, it is 

 unquestionably wrong. These, from the nature of their future employ- 

 ment, must necessarily be exposed to vicissitudes of weather ; and they 

 cannot be too early inured to a certain degree of hardship. They 

 should, indeed, be prevented from lying out in the wet at night ; but, 

 during the day, they cannot be too much abroad ; and dry sheds are 

 far to be preferred to warm stables for their nightly shelter. It has 

 even been found that young colts, who had shown symptoms of disease 

 while kept with all the care usually bestowed on hunters, have 

 recovered when removed to a paddock; and that weaned foals have 

 thriven better when only sheltered in a rick-yard than when 

 housed. 1 



Colts, thus treated, will have acquired sufficient strength and hardi- 

 hood, before the second winter, to be enabled to brave the inclemency of 



1 See Parkinson on Live Stock, vol. ii., pp. 65 67. 



