548 



strong walls become desiccated and weakened, and the foot is in a 

 very sorry plight indeed. To some this picture may seem overdrawn, 

 but it is nevertheless a matter of daily occurrence. 



Of course, even among agricultural horses, there are individuals 

 that can not work unshod; but these are exceptional cases. Then, 

 again, in winter, when the usual snowfall is wanting, most horses' 

 feet will require protection ; but nowadays an owner has himself to 

 blame if he submits to having the work done in that wrong-headed 

 and ridiculous manner, which has called into existence such a long 

 and dismal category of disease and misery. 



The horse's foot is, after all, a good deal of what we make it, and if 

 our horses, from their colthood up, had their feet more carefully 

 attended to, and especially were they invariablj^ to stand while in con- 

 finement on some material less deleterious to the hoof than dry wooden 

 flooring, from which the foot suffers no attrition whatsoever, and by 

 which it is moreover depleted of its natural moisture, their feet would, 

 in the period of the animals' active usefulness, be found to be better 

 shaped, harder, less brittle, and in every way better suited for the 

 work required of them. 



In the East Indies, where pony racing is very popular and the purses 

 exceedingly valuable, many ex]3edients are resorted to to smuggle a 

 pony that is over height under the 13.2 standard (the maximum height 

 for j)onies) among them, of course cutting down the feet as far as can 

 be done with impunity. I frequently observed that those of the hand- 

 some little Arabs and Walers (Australians), which came up oftenest 

 for measurement, and whose feet were in consequence most frequently 

 pared down (albeit by an artist at the business, as these little animals 

 were too valuable for their owners to accept any risk of injury), were 

 those whose feet subsequently stood best the trying ordeal of training 

 and racing on the adamantine going of the tropics. The moral of this 

 is obvious. It might even be possible (I do not mean necessarily in 

 this i)articular way) in the course of generations to develop a horse 

 whose feet should be so improved that he could do all sorts of work on 

 all sorts of going barefoot with impunity; but this would imply an 

 amount of self-sacrifice in the present for the benefit of remote pos- 

 terity which is hardly to be looked for in this practical age, and the 

 contention of enthusiasts that all horses could and should, under all 

 circumstances, go unshod is, I fear, Utopian and imjiractical. 



I have endeavored to show that shoeing, as generally, or at all events 

 very frequently, i^racticed is a fruitful source of injury to our horses' 

 feet; but as we can not altogether dispense with the custom, let us turn 

 to a consideration of the means which lie in our power of minimizing 

 the attendant evil as much as possible. 



There is one instrument which I should like to see, if possible, 

 omitted from the shoeing outfit of every farrier, and that is the draw- 

 ing-knife. If our blacksmiths would use their knives less and their 



