EVERY MAN HIS OWN TRAINER. 1 59 



the quicker the owner and trainer find it out the better. His 

 room is better than his company. 



I am not only strong in the belief that the colt can be 

 trained for speed from his infancy without injury, but that 

 such training if successfully and judiciously given is a great 

 and lasting benefit. It will make him a better aged horse. 

 Let two colts, in all other things equal, be raised together, the 

 one trained from his yearling form, and the other not worked 

 until he is five years old, and the chances are not one in ten 

 that the latter will ever see the day that he is the equal of his 

 trained brother, either in speed or in any of the qualities that 

 go to make a race horse. He will not only be uneducated, of 

 untrained instinct, and wilful ; but he will be deficient in physi- 

 cal development as compared with the trained one. Can the 

 sluggard run, jump, wrestle with the athlete whose muscles 

 have the substance, hardiness and tone of long and constant 

 training? 



But you will ask me, " Do you not think that a great and 

 excessive effort by a young colt will prove permanently detri- 

 mental?" And my answer would be, as a rule, j'fs. But you 

 can train a colt, and if exceedingly promising, you can give 

 him a fast record, without necessarily requiring of him a strain- 

 ing and exhausting effort. If there is one thing more than 

 another, with reference to training colt trotters, which I would 

 enforce and grind into the reader's mind it is this : Never 

 require of the eolt more than he can do zvilhin himself. Never, 

 either in his work or his performance, carry him to the last 

 inch of effort, the point of exhaustion, for at that point not 

 only does all development cease, but you have probably un- 

 done many weeks of work, and have not unlikely inflicted a 

 permanent injury. 



Very little thought then is necessary to comprehend what 

 a delicate matter the training of a young trotter is. If you 

 do not carry it far enough your work will be barren of imme- 

 diate results, while if you carry it too far you will spoil all 

 that is already done and ruin the material that might have 



