92 HINTS ON HORSEMANSHIP 



be used it should be a blunt one, as I have already- 

 said. 



I am no great believer in free jumping in 

 training horses. Yearlings, and stock too young to 

 be ridden over fences, may certainly be trained 

 to jump au naturel over some very low rail as they 

 come in to be fed. This will make them associate 

 the jump and the rail with their dinner; it will 

 give them confidence and make leaping attractive, 

 but it must never be more than a couple of feet off 

 the ground, at most. 



The training and treatment of horses is in so 

 many respects similar to how we should be trained 

 and treated ourselves, one is seldom wrong in 

 taking our own experiences as analogous. 



Supposing we have a boy whom we wanted to 

 do well at, say, high jumping. There would not 

 only be no harm, but it would be strictly beneficial 

 to allow him, when quite small, to amuse himself 

 jumping over little obstacles, such as chairs, and 

 what not. But if we allowed him to practise for 

 his first competition ^vithout the aid of expert 

 advice, we should assuredly make it harder to 

 teach him when we eventually put him into the 

 hands of a trainer. The expert would at once say 

 that he would first have to get him to unlearn all 

 he had learnt before he could start getting him 

 into the proper style, and that it was a great pity 

 he hadn't been allowed to have taken him in hand 

 from the beginning. 



And so it is w^th horses. Their early education 

 may be started by free jumping, but it should be 



