JUDGING HORSES IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS. 3 



CLASSROOM DISCUSSION. 



The horse as a machine. — All farm animals may be considered as 

 machines which have definite work to do. We may look upon the 

 horse as a mechanism which converts raw material in the form of 

 forage and grain into work. In other words, the latent energy in 

 the food is made to do work by means of the living mechanism we 

 call a horse. A machine has value according to its efficiency in doing 

 work. Before we can estimate the efficiency of this particular 



Fig. 1. — A good draft horse. 



machine we must know something about its structure in relation to 

 the work it has to do. 



Anatomy as a oasis for study. — "We may consider the horse as a 

 mechanism in which latent energy in food is made active in muscles 

 which work upon bones as levers, the operation being stimulated and 

 controlled by the nervous system. It may be necessary to review at 

 this time the fundamentals of physiology which have to do with the 

 use of food. Charts showing the skeleton of a horse and the relation 

 of muscles to bones will prove almost indispensable in giving a clear 



