56 Roaring in Horses. 



and more delicate states of tissues and organs, wliicli place 

 horses at a disadvantage when compared with those which 

 live in more favourable climates, and are kept in a more 

 natural way. 



What can be more unnatural, for instance, than the 

 training and racing of horses at two years of age, when 

 they should be running at large and developing their bodies 

 gradually and solidly ? The housing, feeding, grooming, 

 and training lead to abnormal precocity, while the severe 

 exertions required from such immature creatures must be 

 a severe tax upon their constitutions. The evidence of this 

 is seen in training-stables, as well as on race-courses where 

 horses run in five and six furlong races, and are fit for nothing 

 else, and at the sales of " cast-offs " and racing " weeds." 



We are told that the late Mr. Thomas Parr, " in whose 

 hands Fisherman won countless Queen's Plates, and 

 Weatherofaofe, who cost his late owner and trainer no more 

 than £35, won the Cesarewitch, used to maintain that half 

 the Koarers in England picked up that distressing malady in 

 the hot stables of trainers. It was Tom Parr's custom to 

 have Fisherman, Kataplan, Saucebox, Weathergage, Morti- 

 mer, and all the many good horses which passed through 

 his hands, standing in rough-boarded loose-boxes, through 

 the open chinks of which the wind whistled with cutting 

 fierceness in mid-winter, while a single rug w^as thrown 

 over the loins of his horses. Moreover, he rode these 

 habitually as hacks along the roads, and occasionally with 

 the hounds, as had been done many years before by Mr. 

 Fergusson, who is said to have been asked in the hunting- 

 field what he would take for his horse, and to have replied, 

 ' Seven thousand guineas.' The horse in question was 

 Harkaway, who would have been cheap at that price." 



Hot stables, and especially if they are badly ventilated, 

 by predisposing to catarrh, bronchitis, pneumonia, and 

 pleurisy, likewise predispose to Roaring. Improper food 

 may also do so, though of this I have no clear evidence, 

 except in those cases in which it acted as a poison. 



