CONDITIONING 103 



man, but taken to excess debilitates the constitution and 

 prostrates the nervous energy. 



We have already spoken of exercise as ensuring the 

 health of the stabled horse, or as preventing the accession 

 of acute or chronic disorders by means of the lungs, the 

 skin, and the hardening and strengthening of the muscles 

 and lungs by promoting healthy excretion. We are not 

 about to encourage quackery in grooms and horse-keepers — 

 far from it — nor to give such advice as might interfere with 

 the legitimate province of the veterinary surgeon. Yet, as 

 a horse in precarious health, or whose exertions, exposure, 

 or other causes of common occurrence may threaten to dis- 

 able, must often be under the care of his stable attendant, 

 it is as well that a few simple directions should be given in 

 a sanitary sense. Now some grooms physic or bleed the 

 horses entrusted to them at their own discretion. This 

 should never be allowed by any judicious master. Proper 

 feeding, due exercise, diligent grooming, will often preclude 

 the necessity of physic. Sloth and neglect are the parents 

 of disease in an animal so artificially treated as the stabled 

 horse. Well fed, and not exercised, what can be expected 

 but a train of evils, for which the drenching-horn, the 

 balling-iron, and the fleam are to be the panacea! We 

 have personally an intense aversion to unnecessary drugs 

 and the use of the fleam or scalpel. A few plain directions, 

 not to supersede, but to obviate the dire necessity of the 

 instrument case and the battery of the pharmacopoeia, shall 

 here be set down. We will first speak of the treatment of 

 a horse who has been newly taken up from grass. Grass is 

 cooling and aperient to the horse accustomed to hard meat ; 

 it will also fill him with flesh ; but observe, this is not flesh 

 of a description fit for a horse to work upon ; nay, if you 

 tried him a hunting gallop you would find him faint and 

 weak, and the fat accumulated on his cellular tissue would 

 work out in a white lather. This checked will probably 

 produce inflammation of the lungs, and send, as it has sent, 

 many a fine animal to the knacker's yard. 



For the purpose of taking off" fat, and at the same time 

 of improving your horse's stamina, active purgation is 

 seldom required, and therefore you must never think of 

 giving such doses as would be prescribed for the treat- 

 ment of inflammation. Such a practice, so far from doing 

 good, would render your horse weak and languid for several 



