GLANDERS. ,g 3 



horses that had been removed from an open, dry, and healthy situation, became, 

 affected with glanders ; but, some time having passed over, the horses in these 

 stables were as healthy as the others, and glanders ceased to appear. An inn- 

 keeper at Wakefield built some extensive stabling for his horses, and, inhabiting 

 them too soon, lost a great proportion of his cattle from glanders. There 

 are not now more healthy stables in the place. The immense range of stables 

 under the Adelphi, in the Strand, where light never enters, and the supply of 

 fresh air is not too abundant, were for a long time notoriously unhealthy, and 

 many valuable horses were destroyed by glanders ; but now they are filled with 

 the finest waggon and dray-horses that the metropolis or the country contains, 

 and they are fully as healthy as in the majority of stables above-ground. 



There is one more cause to be slightly mentioned — hereditary predisposition. 

 This has not been sufficiently estimated, with regard to the question now under 

 consideration, as well as with respect to everything connected with the breeding 

 of the horse. There is scarcely a disease that does not run in the stock. There 

 is that in the structure of various parts, or their disposition to be affected by 

 certain influences, which perpetuates in the offspring the diseases of the sire ; 

 and thus contraction, ophthalmia, roaring, are decidedly hereditary, and so is 

 glanders. M. Dupuy relates some decisive cases. A mare, on dissection, ex- 

 hibited every appearance of glanders ; her filly, who resembled her in form 

 and in her vicious propensities, died glandered at six years old. A second and 

 a third mare and their foals presented the same fatal proof that glanders are 

 hereditary. 



Glanders are highly contagious. The farmer cannot be too deeply impressed 

 with the certainty of this. Considering the degree to which this disease, 

 even at the present day, often prevails, the legislature would be justified 

 in interfering by some severe enactments, as it has done in the case of the small- 

 pox in the human subject. 



The early and marked symptom of glanders is a discharge from the nostrils 

 of a peculiar character ; and if that, even before it becomes purulent, is rubbed 

 on a wound, or on a mucous surface, as the nostrils, it will produce a similar 

 disease. If the division between two horses were sufficiently high to prevent 

 all smelling and snorting at each other and contact of every kind, and they 

 drank not out of the same pail, a sound horse might live for years, uninfected, 

 by the side of a glandered one. The matter of glanders has been mixed up 

 into a ball, and given to a healthy horse, without effect. Some horses have 

 eaten the hay left by those that were glandered, and no bad consequence has 

 followed ; but others have been speedily infected. The glanderous matter 

 must come in contact with a wound, or fall on some membrane, thin and deli- 

 cate like that of the nose, and through which it may be absorbed. It is easy, then, 

 accustomed as horses are to be crowded together, and to recognise each other 

 by the smell — eating out of the same manger, and drinking from the same pail 

 — to imagine that the disease may be very readily communicated. One horse 

 has passed another when he was in the act of snorting, and has become glan- 

 dered. Some fillies have received the infection from the matter blown by the 

 wind across a lane, when a glandered horse, in the opposite field, has claimed 

 acquaintance by neighing or snorting. It is almost impossible for an infected 

 horse to remain long in a stable with others without irreparable mischief. 



If some persons underrate the danger, it is because the disease may remain 

 unrecognised in the infected horse for some months, or even years, and there- 

 fore, when it appears, it is attributed to other causes or to after inoculation. No 

 glandered horse should be employed on any farm, nor should a glandered horse 

 be permitted to work on any road, or even to pasture on any field. Mischief 

 may be so easily and extensively effected, that the public interest demands that 



